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HPER Chair Believes in Equipping Students for a Healthy Life
By Jadell Forman (Class of 1990)
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At the end of his bed, Fritz has arranged most of his uniform. Shirt above pants, socks next to pants, and freshly polished cleats on the floor. He wears the hat. Lastly, shoe strings, which he hand-washed and tied to the window box fan, flap and twirl in their hurry to dry.
For Fritz, enduring these remaining hours is "treachery." He fills the time by taking up self-created challenges such as counting consecutive catches of a golf ball bouncing down acorn-littered cement steps, or challenging himself to throw a baseball farther than the time before. Fritz fills his free time with "constant challenge," acquiring a taste for physical excellence.
In junior high, Fritz is "more flexible than average." He excels in gymnastics--a sport that offers him not only a constant but new challenge: perfecting a skill. In gymnastics, "a skill must be done correctly to score well," compared to the other sports in which poor execution can still garner points.
In college he's a competitive gymnast and considers the 1980 Olympics. A back injury settles the issue for him, and a U.S. boycott settles the issue for every other American hopeful.
After graduation, Huber stays in Ohio to teach junior high earth science and coach varsity volleyball, softball, and basketball. Upon accepting a head gymnastics coach position in Georgia, he begins eight years of triathlon training and competition.
Pursuit of a master's in biomechanics brings him to the University of Oklahoma, where he races in his first triathlon. Eventually, Huber competes in twenty-five states with an eye on the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
Following doctoral studies in exercise physiology and a few more years of gymnastics coaching, his boyhood friend Jim Kerr (Class of 1981; then ORU's swim coach) encourages Huber to take a job coaching ORU volleyball and teaching in the health, physical education, and recreation department. Huber accepts the job in 1989 and eventually becomes department chairman in 1998, where he now gets to coach others in the joys of physical fitness.
"That's what I love about ORU," he says with a beaming smile in support of the whole-person philosophy. "The majority of the world doesn't consider the body important until it fails them." But at ORU, he enjoys teaching and watching students embrace the value of a physically active lifestyle "so they will be able to do all they want to do, as well as go into all the world." And like his childhood baseball days taught him, "So they will be well-equipped to handle whatever life throws at them."
