A 'Gael through and through': Here's why Jim Martin is Goretti's most interesting man

At St. Maria Goretti High School, Jim Martin is as iconic as he is eclectic.

Among his many passions are sports statistics and singing.

When the 41st Mid-Atlantic Invitational Tournament tips off at Goretti’s Gael Center this weekend, Martin will add to his own impressive stat line, going 41-for-41 at the MAIT as the Goretti boys basketball team statistician, as well as the tourney’s national-anthem singer.

“I’ve done every MAIT game, every single one of them,” said Martin, 75, of Hagerstown.

In fact, he’s kept stats for the team for nearly all of their games, home and away, since the legendary Cokey Robertson, who coached the Gaels from 1974 to 2008, first took over the program. And since 1980, he’s sung the “Star-Spangled Banner” at most home contests.

“I kept score for a lot of the games, and when Cokey came here, I became basically a full-time statistician,” Martin said. “He had me do individual shot charts for every player, rebounds, offensive and defensive, and steals, assists, turnovers, follow-up shots, charges taken, all of it.

“I like the numbers. I got to record every point (former Goretti superstar Rodney Monroe) ever made. That was fun.”

When it comes to Goretti, Martin couldn’t be more devoted.

He taught math at the school for a half-century, coached multiple sports there, was inducted into the Gaels’ athletic hall of fame in 2014, and he still regularly attends events for all Goretti sports.

“He means everything to the school as far as being one of the few remaining guys that are like the core of what Goretti is and what Goretti was,” said Sid McCray, Goretti’s athletic director and boys basketball coach. “He’s a great bridge for the older alumni to where the school is now.

“He’s a true historian and a Gael through and through. He loves Goretti. That’s evident when you talk to him. The man can pull up stats from a boys soccer game from 1994 at Williamsport High School on a Thursday night. If our guys have any questions about the old days at Goretti, he’s pulling up those numbers quick. It’s amazing.”

There are many other interesting notes to Martin’s life.

He once sang for the pope at the Vatican. He once led the prestigious JFK 50 Mile ultramarathon for nearly half the race. He hasn’t owned a car since 1993. And since 1999, he’s written over 9,000 poems.

Coaching the Gaels

Martin — who grew up on a dairy farm in Emmitsburg, Md. — graduated from Emmitsburg High School in 1965 and from Mount St. Mary’s University in 1969, the same year he got his start at Goretti.

“I student-taught at Goretti in the spring of 1969, and they offered me a contract to teach math after my student-teaching was over,” he said.

In 1970, he started a cross country program at the school and coached it for three years.

“Then in the spring of ’73, we had a phys-ed teacher named Jim Churchill, and he was thinking about starting up a (boys) soccer team the following year,” Martin said. “He got me to say that if he wasn’t here the next year that I’d coach it. So he got a 12-game schedule, and then he left to coach football.

“So I had the first soccer team and had people who’d never played before, but I had some good athletes. Most of them had never even seen a soccer ball except for phys-ed class. I figured, ‘Man, this is nuts.’ I figured we were going to get crushed and there wouldn’t be a second-year soccer team. Our first game was down at South and we lost 1-0, and then we played Clear Spring and lost 1-0 in overtime. We ended up being 3-6-3 that first year, and we didn’t give up a whole lot of goals. We tied Williamsport, 0-0, and they were the best team in the county.

“That made it possible for the soccer team to last another year. And the second year, we went 8-4-3. We had good athletes that picked up positioning very well. It takes a while to get the skills, but we were in a lot of games.”

Martin coached the boys soccer team for 25 seasons, through the fall of 1997, and experienced some great success.

“We had one stretch where we went 12-2-2 and then 19-1, 14-2, 15-3, 17-3 and 13-4-5,” he said. “We had a really good stretch of pretty good players.”

Martin also coached Goretti softball for 15 years and had brief stints coaching girls soccer, girls basketball and freshman boys basketball.

Leading the JFK 50 Mile

In 1968, Martin took up distance running.

“I ran a lot, just for the fun of it,” he said. “The first couple years I taught at Goretti, I was probably doing about 4,000 miles a year, just for fun.”

In 1971, he entered the JFK 50 Mile for the ninth annual edition of the race, running a course comprised of the Appalachian Trail, C&O Canal towpath and rolling paved roads.

Martin quickly found himself in first place.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I liked to run in the mountains. I ran in the mountains every day,” he said. “I started passing people going up toward South Mountain, and I didn’t see another runner from about 6 miles until Elton Horst passed me around mile 25.”

Horst went on to win the race in a then-course-record time of 6 hours, 15 minutes and 42 seconds, while Martin faded to a 16th-place finish in 9:27:13. That year, 589 runners started the race, but only 150 finished.

“The second half, I was dying. I just felt dead,” Martin said. “And then I went to the doctor’s the next week and found out I had mono. That explains why my second half was horrible.”

That was Martin’s only JFK finish. When he started coaching, his running took a backseat.

However, he still contributes to the JFK, singing the national anthem at the start line in downtown Boonsboro, before the gun fires to send the runners on their way.

Singing for the pope

Martin loves to sing, always has, he said.

“I’ve sung all my life,” he said. “My family sang. My mom and dad and aunts and uncles were all singers. We had a quartet — my two sisters, my brother and I. We used to sing in a lot of churches.

“On the farm, I’d be out plowing fields and stuff, and I’d be singing for five hours straight.”

How did he end up singing for the pope?

“I was in the Mount St. Mary’s glee club, and we had a European Tour back in 1968,” he said. “We sang in England and then we went to Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and then France. And we sang at the Vatican there at St. Peter’s for Pope Paul the VI. It was a big deal.”

No car, no problem

For the last 30 years, Martin has used his own two legs as his main form of transportation.

“In 1993, I had high blood pressure real bad, so I got rid of my car. I haven’t had a car since 1993,” he said. “I started walking, and then I started jogging and then I started running. From November of ’93 to March of ’94, I lost 65 pounds. And then I started running about 8 miles a day, a good 3,000 miles a year.”

Although he stopped running about 15 years ago, he still walks to get to most places.

“I know every part of Hagerstown, but I can’t run anymore,” he said. “My right knee is shot. I should get it operated on. It hurts all the time. But as long as I’ve got pain, I’m still alive.”

These days, one of his daily routes takes him to Goretti’s Gael Center. He retired from teaching a few years ago.

“I go, I get on the internet, do some reading, do some writing,” he said. “It’s home.”

Martin, who never married or had children, said Goretti is his family.

‘I like to rhyme stuff’

Martin also is a poet.

“Since 1999, I’ve written over 9,000 poems. I don’t know what got me started,” he said. “Out of the 9,000, I’d say 8,900-plus are garbage, but it’s given me something to do. I like to rhyme stuff.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, a day of tragedy in the U.S., Martin wrote a poem about it, titled “Another Day of Infamy.”

His colleagues read it and encouraged him to print out copies.

“We got off early that day, and I went down to Sheetz and gave away 750 copies of that thing,” he said. “I found out that one ended up with the governor, one ended up with a general somewhere, and about a week or so later, some firemen from Hagerstown went up to New York and found it hanging in a Brooklyn fire station. It got around somehow.”

Rooting for Navy

Martin’s father had a famous friend, Rip Engle, the head coach of the Penn State football team from 1950-65.

“My dad always had a free pass waiting for him for a Penn State football game,” Martin said. “But my dad was a dairy farmer. He couldn’t take off on a Saturday.

“I didn’t mind the farming per se, but I hated the cows. Just think about it, I could have gone to a lot of Penn State games if we weren’t dairy farmers. That would have been a big treat for a little kid.”

Instead, he became a fan of Navy.

“Saturday was the day we used to shovel manure all day long, and that’s why I became a Navy fan,” he said. “We’d get WBAL radio out in the barn, and they’d broadcast Navy games, and I’d root for Navy. I never rooted for Maryland because Maryland wasn’t on WBAL.”

Go Gaels!

Right now, Martin is excited for another season of Goretti basketball.

He might be the Gaels’ No. 1 fan, and he has the important job of staying on top of all the numbers and stats.

“It keeps me off the referees,” he said. “You have to concentrate.”

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: St. Maria Goretti's Jim Martin has done it all