A leading athletics coach in the Hunter Valley has announced his retirement after more than half a century in the business.
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Max Debnam, who has coached 30 Australian representatives since starting out 52 years ago, has decided to finish up his career trackside.
Debnam becomes the second athletics coach to call it a day in the Hunter following the pending departure of Gillieston Heights- based Tony Fairweather to the Gold Coast ahead of the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
This leaves a massive hole for athletics in the region but Debnam has provided a lifetime of dedication to the sport.
In 1960, while still a track and field competitor, he started coaching in a golden age of Australian sport with a small group of athletes.
Two years later he took Janet Knee to the Commonwealth Games in Perth where she won bronze in the women’s long jump.
Olympic Games were also on the agenda for another women’s long jumper in Linda Garden (1984) and Glen Carroll from the same discipline while under Debnam’s care.
He also helped Eliza Stankovic to a Paralympic appearance.
One of Debnam’s current charges, Thornton’s Emily Coppins, is travelling in Europe with the Australian team preparing for the World Junior Championship being held in Barcelona next month.
On a wider scale the 2000 Australian Sports Medal recipient has been involved in all facets of track and field, as a coach, manager and lecturer at an international level.
Debnam is a life member of the Hunter Academy of Sport, Athletics NSW and Athletics Australia and in 2005 he received the Henry Schubert Memorial Award for
distinguished services to the sport.
And Debnam, who has had years of involvement with the Newcastle Knights, is the only person from the region to have been appointed a national coach.
“All this from his coaching base in Newcastle, his lifetime home,” Hunter Academy of Sport chief executive officer Ken Clifford said.
“He is a very proud Novacastrian.”
In 1982 and 2006 Debnam returned to the Commonwealth Games, first with Garden and followed by Michael Perry (triple jump) and Mark Taylor (high jump) in Melbourne more recently.
Along the way there have been world championship, world cup and world university carnivals with the likes of Paul Henderson, Chad Stephenson, Kerrie Waite and Shaun Fletcher.
