Texas-born Jim White grew up in Stockton, California, the son of a small home builder. He wanted to become a baseball player, but didn’t get a chance to shine. He decided to become a coach and treat his athletes differently.
He married Cheryl, the daughter of a minister, and taught at a Christian College in Idaho for a time before moving to McFarland, California, in 1962.
Jim began helping out at the local church, teaching at the local junior high school and 15 years later moved on to teaching at McFarland High School.
Over the years, McFarland welcomed migrant families from Mexico who worked in the vineyards. These families didn't have much of an education, or speak very much English, and worked for little pay. By 2000, according to the census, the population of the town was more than 95 per cent Hispanic.
In 1980 Jim and Cheryl would begin to build boys and girls running programs at the high school (in the film, Jim starts a running program in 1987, which was the first year his team won the state championship). After noticing that the Latino students, who worked in the vineyards, could run fast and for long distances, Jim encouraged them to join his cross country team.
The boys would go to work in the morning, then to school and then back to work, to help their families put food on the table. Jim trained them by getting them to run 10 miles a day. He would bicycle alongside them, coaching and encouraging as they ran. He also helped them out in any way that he could. Some of the boys had personal problems, some were school related, but he always worked to give them a chance to aspire to better lives than being migrant workers their entire lives. He felt everyone should be given an equal chance in life. He believed in these runners and his belief would come to fruition as McFarland would go on to compete in the state championships.
In a 1997 article in the Los Angeles Times (on which the film is based), former student Thomas Valles, who led McFarland to its first state title in 1987, admitted, "I come from a broken family. My father was an alcoholic and he left when I was 14. My sisters got pregnant at 13 and 14. My little brother was jailed. I used to come to the meets with no money to eat with. The bus would pull up to a restaurant and I'd just shy away from everybody and say I wasn't hungry. White would find me and say, 'Come on, let's eat.”
Although Jim White’s success brought lucrative offers from other schools, Palo Alto wasn’t one of them, as depicted in the movie. However, as he said in the movie, it was never about the money and he stayed in McFarland. During his coaching career, his teams earned nine California state championships, the most won by any team in the state.
Over the course of his tenure as coach from 1980 to 2002, Jim and the boys would find family in each other and would learn more about life, as their two worlds collided. Jim was known for being a tough coach by his runners but also for his selfless acts of helping out with the boys, the town and the church. Although he retired, Jim is still a pillar of the community, helping with the school’s running program and at the church.
Jim's story was made into a Disney film titled McFarland, starring Kevin Costner as Jim and Maria Bello as his wife Cheryl.
~Andrew Siwik