St. Peter’s Lutheran cross-country coach Jeff Niewedde, left, runs the 5K at the Mill Race Marathon along with his son Keaton Sept. 27.
Submitted photo
When the St. Peter’s girls won the Lutheran National Cross-Country Championship last fall, they did it without their coach who was in the hospital in a coma.
This weekend, the Lions boys and girls teams will be back in Mequon, Wisconsin, looking for more national hardware, and coach Jeff Niewedde will be leading the charge.
Niewedde was working on a tractor on his property last Sept. 21 when a tree fell on his face. He was placed in a medically-induced coma for two months.
Doctors stopped counting at 100 fractures, and placed titanium plates and screws in his face. Niewedde emerged from the coma Nov. 20.
“When I woke up, that was the difference,” Niewedde said. “I am a positive and motivated person, so whenever I woke up, and they came in and asked me, ‘Do you want to walk today?’ My answer is always going to be ‘Yes.’ The biggest thing going through all the therapy was patience, patience, patience, and taking time to doing it the right way”
Niewedde was able to return home home Dec. 7. The next three-to-four months, he did physical therapy and speech therapy.
Jeff Niewedde
A father of three teenage boys, Niewedde, 44, had built his parents a room on his house with a walk-in closet and bathroom three months before the accident. His parents and kids were able to help him when he returned from the hospital.
“I’ve always been a giver and not a getter, so during that six months, it was different because I was getting a lot from a lot of people vs. giving,” Niewedde said. “The coaches have been good with me, and everybody has been really caring and loving all season. I don’t call it a team. I call it a family. It’s my XC family.”
Niewedde does independent accounting work. He has operated Indiana Timing since 2009 and has timed more that 400 road races.
In April, Niewedde returned to coaching the St. Peter’s track team.
“It’s a good feeling just to get back to practices,” Niewedde said. “The practices give me energy. At the end of the day, I have energy coming out of the practices. A lot of people up in Indy would ask me, ‘That has to be draining by the end of the day. to go through something like that.’ I’m like ‘Actually, no. When I get done with practices, I actually have more energy than when I got of work that day be more I came to do coaching.’ It’s motivating.”
Last month, Niewedde ran the 5K at the Mill Race Marathon with his team.
“It’s a lot different because last year, I was in a coma,” Niewedde said. “This year, I can actually run the entire way, so we did the 5K together.”
St. Peter’s swept the boys and girls Lutheran School state titles earlier this month at Trinity Lutheran. Marquez Mendez, Henry Meredith, Mason Package and Cooper Troyer are the top boys runners; while Chloe Package, Guiliana Mackos, Veronica Phillips and Aaliyah Miller lead the girls team.
“It’s been good to have the banter again with the kids,” Niewedde said. “I don’t get paid a dime to coach. It’s all in here (pointing to his heart), and that’s the way I like it. I get paid by the good kids you have that come through the program and teaching them the right things to do — the right way to nutritionalize, the right way to train and stretch and to do everything the right way, so that way when they get to high school, they have a good knowledge already of what to do and do it the right way.”
Before his accident last year, Niewedde had told his girls team that it had a shot at a national championship, and that if they did, he would not cut his hair for a year.
“One of the funniest things about the nationals is, I made a deal with them,” Niewedde said. “I said, ‘If you win nationals, I’m not going to cut my hair until next year.’ So when I woke up in the hospital, I felt the top of my head, and they actually didn’t shave my head. When they did the surgery, they cut a line from ear to ear, and then they kind of pulled my skin up, and they went in from up top to do the surgery on my face. That’s why there’s no cut on my face or anything. So when I felt my hair, I was like, ‘Wow, they didn’t shave it.’ When I found out the girls won, I said, ‘All right, I still have my hair.’ It was God’s way of making sure that played out.”
Niewedde has a hair appointment Thursday, and the girls team will style and color his hair. The teams leave Friday morning for Wisconsin.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” Niewedde said. “That’s what I agreed to. That’s what I have to rock up to Wisconsin, so it will be interesting to see what it looks like.”
Niewedde, who ran cross-country and track at Brownstown Central and University of Indianapolis, has been able to share life lessons with his teams since his return.
“One of the best things God brings is consistency in life and even the negative things that you have in life, how you flip the negatives into positives,” Niewedde said. “That’s one of the best things to try to teach the kids at the middle school level. Even on a bad day, if something doesn’t go your way or doesn’t go the way you thought it was going to go, how to turn it and make it a positive thing for yourself or your team. There’s so many negative things in today’s world that you can flip into positives and have a positive mindset and a good, optimistic mindset every day.
“That’s the beauty that God brings to you because even when I struggled through last year, I still give God all the glory,” he added. “I had to go through something like that for a reason. I had to understand what it was for and give Him all the glory for even the dark times. Once I woke up, you appreciate the things that I have. It’s just a good thing to be back to where I am now.”
Niewedde taking St. Peter’s back to national meet after major injury last year
