Janis Rogers said that if her father, Verle Tolley, were alive this week, he would be decked out in San Francisco 49ers gear from head to toe as he eagerly awaited his team to step onto the field Sunday for the Super Bowl.
A northern California native, he rooted for the Giants and 49ers until his dying days, donning orange, black, red, gold and — reminiscent of his Brigham Young University days — blue and white as his home teams both triumphed and faltered.
He was loyal, Rogers’ sister Wende Knight said, and that loyalty extended not only to his favorite pro teams in the NFL and major league baseball.
Tolley taught and coached at Wasatch County High School for 30 years. Former students, fellow teachers, his family and the school administrators remember him today as a staple of the community, a determined altruist who brought out the best in his athletes, and who taught a good number of Wasatch County residents how to drive.
Last week, the Wasatch County Board of Education named the high school’s track after him, a fitting memorial since he raised the funds for a rubberized track.
“This is something that we’ve wanted to do and honor him,” Board of Education President Tyler Bluth said.
Tolley’s name will live among those of other influential coaches at Wasatch High who had the football stadium named after them — Dan Wright and Ron Tree.
Rogers said she only asked the school board about the possibility of naming the track after her father. A while later, when she heard back from the district and had a meeting with the superintendent, everyone stood behind the idea.
“When we walked in, he was like, ‘We’re doing this,'” she said. “‘This is the right thing to do. We are going to do this.'”
Rogers, Knight and their sister Lori Lewis reminisced about what it means to have a dad who doubles as a general do-gooder and a pillar of community service. When he started prioritizing social programs for the elderly in the community, they ran Meals on Wheels plates from his truck to doorsteps. When he started the recreation program in Wasatch County, they went with him to groom the baseball diamonds at the end of 600 South. And when he served in dual roles as their father and coach, he expected them to give their best just like everyone else.
“The one year with his girl’s basketball team, they did not lose one game the whole season, and they were the winningest team in the state that year,” said Tolley’s wife, Colleen.
And though he excelled in coaching every team he led, his strongest suit was track and field, the sport where he brought home six state championships.
John Moss, a current teacher at Wasatch County School District and former fellow coach with Tolley, saw him in action. While Tolley was a more than capable coach, leading many teams to championships, Moss said it wasn’t with the tough love you might expect.
“He was as kind a coach as I ever coached with. There was no yelling and screaming from Verle. He was a mentor to the kids,” Moss said. “He expected a lot from them, and they knew he expected a lot, but he got it out of them without yelling and screaming.”
Tolley was a student of the sport and knew what he needed from his athletes, Moss said. During track meets when there wasn’t a lot of in-the-moment coaching to be done, Tolley would sit in the stands with a list of his athletes and their events.
“He would be watching as they would do their times or their distances,” Moss remembered. “At some point in there, generally before the meet was half done, he would come over to the rest of us and say, ‘It’s OK, we’ve got this,’ or ‘We’re going to miss out just by a little.’ He could foresee exactly what his kids were going to do because he knew it so well. He knew them so well. He knew how they were going to finish compared to everyone else.”
According to Knight, her dad didn’t leave his calculations at the track. She remembered the family’s dinner table decorated with different schools’ teams and athletes as her father performed his time, distance and point calculations.
“I thought I was going to be a 400-meter runner through my whole high school career,” Lewis said. “I think it was my junior year, he couldn’t get too many girls to run the two mile. Who wants to run the two mile? And he came to me and he said, ‘Lori, we’re going to put you in the two mile in this meet.’ And I was not happy.”
Still, Tolley insisted his daughter try and told her he wanted to see how she would do.
“He’s like, ‘I think this is where we’re going to get points in the two mile,'” she remembered.
After already finishing the mile and the half-mile races, a not-so-thrilled Lewis found herself at the starting line for the two-mile race.
“I ran off of just adrenaline, just so mad,” she said. “But I broke the state record the first time that I ran it.”
He knew where his athletes would win, and he knew what his daughter was capable of, and where she could excel. She won state in the two-mile run her remaining two years in high school.
His careful crafting didn’t end at the racetrack. When he coached basketball games in other towns, Rogers said, “he would walk the streets at night and strategize.”
Though Tolley may have been kind and patient, he wasn’t one to hesitate to stick up for his players.
“I remember one time a man in town made a disparaging remark about girls playing sports, and Dad defended the girls,” Colleen said. “That man never made another remark about it.”
On another occasion, Tolley took Lewis to the state cross-country meet her sophomore year.
“The 2A classification didn’t have their own race. We had to run with the 3A and 4A races,” Lewis remembered. “He told me, he says, ‘Lori, we’re going to boycott this race.'”
She remembered that he was worried that he might get barred from coaching for a year or fined by the Utah High School Activities Association. With his teacher’s salary, he was already moonlighting at a local security gig, and his passion for coaching was evident.
“But he was willing to do it,” Lewis said. “He didn’t know what personal stakes were going to be. We talked about that all day.”
Lewis doesn’t remember a lot of details about that day. She’s not sure how people reacted, or if other runners joined her in her unsanctioned protest run.
What she does remember is that the next year, there was a race designated for 2A high schools, and Wasatch High took state.
Asked what his motivation was for continuously working so hard, Colleen had no hesitation.
“His love of the kids,” she said. “He did a lot for them. He was a calm person and a smart man.”
In the early 1990s, Tolley fell from a ladder and suffered a severe injury to his head. Moss remembered this as the end of his coaching career. H died in 2022.
Bluth, a physical therapist, worked with Tolley throughout that period and said he got to know him well.
“He was still able to run, and continued to run around the valley of Heber,” he said. “You would see Verle everywhere running and jogging all the way up into his 70s.”
Often, his runs would lead him back to the Wasatch High track.