Coach Andy Chan is an important part of SHC’s sports community. After becoming Head Coach in 1998, Coach Andy’s dedication has helped SHC’s Cross Country and Track and Field programs flourish and soar to new heights.
A San Francisco native, Coach Andy attended Lowell High School, where he was first introduced to cross country. He fell in love with the sport and its team community throughout his high school career. Andy “realized at the end of high school that I really loved the sport and I wanted to still be a part of it,” but as he was going to UCLA for college, a NCAA Division 1 school, he knew he “wasn’t good enough to be a runner on the team anymore, so the natural thing was to be a manager, which introduced me to coaching.”
Over his lengthy tenure as an SHC coach, Andy has had some opportunities to switch to coaching college cross country. However, he has consistently decided to continue coaching at the high school level. “There is so much more diversity in terms of why people are on the [SHC] team. It’s not just about pursuing NCAA championships, so there’s a better opportunity to get someone to just improve and like running,” Coach Andy describes. The Cross Country and Track and Field coach consistently emphasizes that a main goal of his team is to give people a community that supports them, no matter how fast they race.
After 27 years of coaching at SHC, one of Coach Andy’s most memorable moments was when Shannon Rowbury ‘02, a future three time Olympian, was a runner at SHC. When Shannon won her first Track and Field State Championship, Coach Andy explained, “it was very exciting. Growing up in California… it always seemed like somebody else was winning, and it was cool to be the one actually coaching Shannon as she was winning.” To this day, Coach Andy is still very close with Shannon, and he recently helped coach her through the NYC Marathon. Another moving memory of Coach Andy’s was the Cross Country CCS meet in 2023, when both the girls and boys teams qualified for the state meet, giving Andy a lasting happy memory to associate with the same season when his dad passed away.
Coach Andy’s cross country and track teams are known throughout SHC and San Francisco for their sense of community, which is in part fostered by both the head coach and the assistant coaches. Coach Andy describes, “I think we’ve been very lucky that the leadership on the team believes in these values, and then they pass it on to the freshman. I think a simple way to foster community is by focusing on knowing someone’s name, and then we are in a good place to start.” However, there is always room for growth, and Coach Andy hopes he can encourage the “community building aspect of the team,” especially since having a bigger team made it “challenging to get to know the many freshmen.” As the team inevitably grows bigger each year because of an increased interest, probably partly due to the Cross Country team’s social media presence, Coach Andy recognizes that “even at my older age, in 2024, for a program to be successful you do need to have a form of social media. Even if I can’t maintain that social media presence to make us be cool, we can recruit people on the team to do that. Especially today, that’s a key part of a head coach’s job at the high school level.”
This past cross country season has been very successful, both for individual runners and the team as a whole. In Coach Andy’s words, “we ran the races that we wanted to run at CCS, which was the day we needed it to qualify both teams for state.” As the cross country season came to a close, Coach Andy looked ahead to the upcoming track season, which starts in the middle of February. Given the cross country team’s success, this upcoming track season is set to be an exciting one! Visit shcathletics.com to see where to catch Coach Andy and his runners next!
