Frank Perbeck, Baldwin High School’s new head principal and long time track and field coach, has an athletic background unique to almost anyone. Starting in 1972 as a sophomore in high school he found a lot of success throwing javelin.

“I just ran up not knowing what I was doing and gunned it,” Perbeck said. “Once I learned the steps I regressed and was throwing worse until I got the coordination and the steps down. Then I far surpassed my first throws.”

Perbeck continued to throw throughout high school, throwing jaw droppingly long distances along the way.

“I remember my longest throw in high school to the inch: 237’9”,” he said, “and I threw that at the Golden West Invitational out in California. I won that.”

Perbeck’s outstanding throwing ability took him through high school and even college.

“It got me a full-ride scholarship,” Perbeck said, “If I hadn’t have gone to school to play football or to do track and earned a scholarship, I don’t know if we would’ve been able to afford it, being raised from a family of seven kids.”

Perbeck attended school and graduated from Kansas State University, throwing on the track and field team each year. However, the story does not end there.

“I was a graduate assistant at KSU and threw and traveled with a team in 1980 in hopes of qualifying for the Olympic Trials,” he said. “I was third in the Olympic Sports Festival which gave me hope, but then one day I got back from a work out and Jimmy Carter, our president at the time, had gone on T.V. to announce that the U.S. was boycotting the Olympics in Moscow because they had invaded Afghanistan. So that bursted my dream in 1980 and I figured that I need to get a teaching job.”

Perbeck’s experience as a javelin thrower appears to give him an upper hand in teaching students how to throw according to head track coach Michael Spielman.

“I think any time that you can have done the activity or the sport, you have that inside knowledge and know what it feels like. Those experiences are really valuable,” Spielman said.