Bernie Pearce has a stopwatch around his neck, a clipboard in hand, and he’s worrying about restaurant reservations.
It’s Monday afternoon, and the track team leaves for the state championship in Lakewood Wednesday morning. He’s got a dozen things running through his mind as practice begins in Fellin Park: which athletes have qualified for which races, how many relay batons and sets of starting blocks they need to bring, when they need to leave to avoid road closures. And he still needs to schedule their pre-meet dinner.
But while Pearce readily admits he’s been “buried in logistics,” he looks unbothered. He isn’t new to this juggling act: he’s always been someone drawn to problem-solving and managing a lot.
Pearce, 65, was hired in 1979 as a math and Spanish teacher. When there was a vacancy teaching upper-level science classes, he added physics and chemistry, too.
He can’t remember exactly when he became the school’s athletic director — he thinks it’s been about 25 years — and he still holds the title now, despite being “semi-retired.”
While overseeing all of the school’s sports, he coaches boys and girls cross country in the fall and girls’ track in the spring, and for the last 12 years, he’s taught a Spanish class, too, usually Spanish 2 or Spanish 3 and 4, depending on the semester. When the district couldn’t find a school bus driver in 2020, Pearce took that on, driving a morning route to Ridgway until a full-time driver was hired.
“Bernie has been the backbone of the school for the last forty-plus years,” School Board president and former teacher Sandy Kern said.
“He is also the most organized person I’ve ever known and the hardest working. And I don’t think that he even knows how hard he works compared to everyone else. There is just a job that needs to be done — whether it is teaching, coaching, admin duties — and he does it.”
A teacher ‘only by accident’
“A huge amount of predetermined accident” led Pearce to his career in education, he said.
His parents were both teachers, and had taught in Telluride and in Aspen, where he was raised.
At the University of Northern Colorado, he studied math, liking the intrigue and rigor of the subject, and Spanish, which he had studied since elementary school and which his dad had taught. He never set out to follow his parents’ footsteps into teaching, though.
“I think I sort of fell into the enthrallment of it, only by accident,” he said.
When he saw the opening in Ouray, he thought he’d give it a try, but hoped from the beginning that it would work out for the long-term.
“I tend to be a creature of habit, so I thought ‘this better be a good choice,’” he said.
He’d been to Ouray only once before, passing through on a drive after a car breakdown in Durango. But he liked what he remembered, and he knew Ouray native and future Sheriff “Junior” Mattivi from college, so he figured he’d know at least one person in town.
Coming from another small mountain town and being so close in age to his students, he quickly built a rapport with the students, though “they probably humored me more than I realized.”
In his interview, he was asked what else he could do besides teach, a question commonly asked in the small school, so he put his hand up to coach. “I was naive enough to say ‘I’ll try it,’” he said, starting his career coaching track and field and middle school basketball.
Ron Cline had been at Ouray School for almost 15 years when Pearce arrived, teaching industrial arts, technology and driver’s education. “He was a great addition” who was always up for a challenge, Cline said.
In the small school, “you had to wear a lot of hats,” Cline said, and Pearce gladly took on many.
“When he was asked to do physics and chemistry, he did it and I never heard any complaints,” he said.
Kern recalls that Pearce was never behind on his grading, and that he was always creating interesting lessons. He got along with everyone, she said. “I have never heard Bernie disparage any person or other school or other team in any way, and there have certainly been many opportunities to do so,” Kern said. “He has been able to work with every superintendent and principal and teacher who has come through the school over all these years.”
He was known for his puns, which he could come up with instantaneously, making students and colleagues laugh and groan.
Ouray basketball coach Adam Trujillo was a senior when Pearce began his teaching career. He was young and enthusiastic, and had the same penchant for rhyming that he still has today, Trujillo said. “He’s always trying to deliver it in a way that is memorable,” he said.
A few years later, he started coaching alongside Pearce as his assistant. “Bernie was always really good with fundamentals and teaching,” he said.
His demeanor belied his own athletic skills: on their town basketball team, which played in Silverton and Montrose, Pearce earned the nicknames “Burn” and “Singe,” first a spin on his name and then a reference to his ability to hit long three-point shots, Trujillo said. He wore taped-together black glasses, “kind of a goofy look,” he said, “until you saw him shoot the ball, and then nobody was laughing.”
A ‘partner in learning’
Now, Pearce is a well-known face in Ouray and across the Colorado High School Athletic Association. At track practice in the park and sitting on a bench outside the school, he seems to know just about everyone who passes by.
“If you don’t have time to talk, don’t say hi to Bernie,” Cline said, “because he’s got a gift of gab.”
But he doesn’t think that has always been the case.
Growing up, he didn’t see himself as someone who reached out to others, or who others reached out to, he said, describing himself as “nerd level 3.”
He played sports growing up, including basketball, track and field and tennis and a short-lived attempt at football in eighth grade, but he often kept to himself.
“I seemed to have the respect of my peers, but I was not the ‘hangout’ person,” he said. “I was more my own person.”
But he also watched the way his mother tried to bring people into conversations, especially younger people, and he learned from that, something he thinks shaped the way he interacts with students now.
In the classroom, he tried to be more of a “partner in learning” than someone lecturing to a class, and he likes athletes to be involved in their training, so they can understand what they’re doing and why.
He wants them to know why he’s asking them to do a certain drill, why he’s arranging the relay race a certain way, and hear what they think they need or should do, too. He wants to know if they’re feeling sluggish or having a rough day, so he can shift the workout plans accordingly, and he’s always watching other coaches to pick up new training ideas.
As a math teacher, he sometimes told students to make mistakes on purpose when they did problems on the board, ostensibly so their peers could try to catch the error. That gave them permission to be imperfect, and license to try something even if they weren’t quite sure what to do, he said.
“It’s transformational versus transactional coaching,” Pearce said: instead of “I know, I impart, you do,” the goal is to figure things out together. By making them part of the process, “they begin to think more critically, as opposed to being puppeted along.”
An impact beyond athletics
Much of Pearce’s work is behind the scenes: scheduling competitions, serving on league and statewide athletic committees and coordinating team drivers.
Before the spring athletic season ended, he was already at work planning for the fall.
Sometimes, he’s the one making difficult decisions, like dropping the girls’ volleyball and basketball teams. For the first time in his 42 years at the school, Pearce had to announce last spring that they would no longer offer a team in either sport due to low participation numbers.
“It felt like part of the school had been severed,” he said. “It just did not feel good at all.”
He still wants to bring those teams back, though he worries about the school’s dropping enrollment. He expects to have 43 students in the high school in the fall, the lowest number he’s seen since the mid-1980s.
Figuring out if there are enough athletes to fill teams is just another item on his lengthy list.
“I’ve often thought what a thankless job that is,” Cline said. “He loves it, apparently, and he’s quite adept at it.”
“His mind just works in a way that he can juggle times and dates and situations,” he said. “Something falls through and he makes a new plan.”
Pearce’s goal is to make things as seamless for the athletes as possible, getting the preparation out of the way so all they have to do is show up and compete.
“You’re trying to do justice to making sure that all those pieces are in place so the athletes basically just have to perform,” he said.
But for the students he coaches, his impact is obvious. “I don’t know if he sleeps,” said Rock Gibbs, who grad
“I don’t know if he sleeps,” said Rock Gibbs, who graduated last month. In the seven years he’s known Pearce through middle and high school, Gibbs is hard-pressed to think of a time Pearce made a mistake. “It seems everything is always on track,” he said. “He’s super dedicated, and we’re lucky to have him.”
“He’s super encouraging and positive,” Ridgway junior Lily Berwanger said. She was the only member of the girls’ track team to qualify for state, but even when the team was frustrated during the season, Pearce stayed optimistic, she said.
“He lets us know it’s OK, every race isn’t going to be your best,” she said. When she came into the season with big goals, “he supported me in everything I wanted to do,” she said.
Silverton runners Belen Roof and Kharis Weller have spent years driving back and forth over Red Mountain Pass to run for the regional track and cross country teams that Pearce coaches.
He’s never a coach runners are scared of, Roof said, and while he wants them to achieve their goals, they know he would be proud of them “even if you ran a 40-minute mile.”
“He gives the best pep talks,” Weller said. “He’s always in a positive mindset, whether you have a good race or a bad race.”
His impact extends beyond athletics because he cares about producing not just good athletes, but good people, and he leads by example, said Hayden Hart, who graduated last month.
“From pee wee basketball to state cross country, Bernie Pearce has devoted countless hours to Ouray’s athletics,” Hart said in his valedictorian speech at graduation. “Not only does he help students become incredible athletes, he molds them into great citizens and responsible members of our community.”
Assembling the next puzzle
Heading into his 44th season coaching this fall, Pearce still loves putting together the puzzle pieces of each new team each year.
“It’s kind of like a whole bunch of parts that you stumble into and you know that they can function as something, and you’re not sure what or how to put them together,” he said. “But you sort of assemble this team every year, and you’re always looking for their strengths and things to stay away from.”
At one point, Cline thought he and his wife would have the longest careers at Ouray School. She taught for more than 30 years, and he retired after 42 years, the last eight part-time.
“Bernie’s shattering all of that,” Cline said. “The thing is, the guy never ages. He looks today like he did 20 years ago.”
Pearce isn’t making plans yet to move from “semi-retirement” to retirement. “I still have energy and enthusiasm for what I do,” he said.
Asked how many hours he works a week, Pearce paused. “Let’s call it 60,” he said, though most of those are technically as a volunteer.
“I burn the midnight oil and get up with the chickens,” he said, and he isn’t tired of the cycle yet.
The town he’d only seen once has long-since become his home, and the job he thought he’d just try out brought him into the tight-knit community.
“I do feel like this has been a wonderful fit,” Pearce said. “It’s really been a privilege to be here. That’s not to say that everything is picture perfect, but it’s a real gift to be able to come here and share in the family atmosphere.”
Liz Teitz is a reporter with Report for America, a nonprofit program which places journalists in underserved areas. To support her work with a tax-deductible donation, email erin@ouraynews.com.
