Jason Bodnar: Accounting for the Penn Relays clockwork

April is no ordinary month for Edward R. Koch. A CPA by trade, Koch spends the early part of the month sorting through 1040s and W2s, itemized deductions and write-offs. He's like an elf during Christmas, a man behind the scenes in that unofficial April 15 accountant holiday, Tax Day. The latter part of the month? Well, in one way, it's much the same for the 1975 Penn graduate. He's still behind the scenes, vital but virtually invisible. But this time he's dealing with 400s and 4x2s, pre-race instructions and hand-offs. Edward R. Koch is an official at the Penn Relays and has been for 16 years now. It's a different sort of accounting for him. A better sort of accounting. "My reward for sitting through tax season is coming here," Koch says. Koch -- not to be confused with the former New York City mayor of the same name -- ran track for Penn. He's run in the Relays eight times (one in high school, four at Penn, three for a club team). He's even won a medal in the Relays, a silver freshman relay medal he's made the showcase of his medal board. But Koch doesn't run the Relays anymore. Twenty-something years, achilles tendonitis and a pinched vertebrae has seen to that. Instead, he's just one of the people helping out, one of the 31 clerks. Yes, that's right, 31 clerks. Look at page eight in this year's program. There's a list of more than 500 Penn Relay Carnival officials -- more than 500 Relays officials like Koch, unappreciated but absolutely necessary. Penn Relays is the largest track meet in the nation, and it's no easy task to get the more-than-22,000 athletes on and off the track (or field) in just the right amount of time. Just the right limited amount of time is more like it. From 1:25 p.m. until 4:40 p.m. today, there will be exactly 40 high school girls' 1,600-meter relays, each one with about 15 teams. One is scheduled to start every five minutes. Each one will last at least four minutes. That means the officials have less than 60 seconds to get 60 athletes off the track and 60 new ones on the track. Sure, i'm impressed by a 3:59.9 split by Alan Webb or a collegiate record by a Texas Christian sprinting foursome, but sometimes I'm a little more impressed by just how efficient the Penn Relays are. The average high school dual meet has nine events on the track and takes about two-and-a-half hours. At one point tomorrow, 52 races will take place on Franklin Field in just an hour-and-a-half. I don't mean to slight the average high school meet, as there are only a handful of officials at most of them, but the clockwork of Penn Relays is truly astounding. And clockwork is where Koch and company come in. Clerks like him check in relay teams, try to find out which teams are not there, check to see if uniforms and shoes are legal, make sure front and hip numbers are prominently displayed on the athletes, line up the teams and escort them onto the track. Think that sounds like a lot? Well, don't forget the other officials -- the starters, the timers, the ones that make sure runners are running in the right lanes and jumpers are taking off beyond the toeboard, all of them. It's quite a large contingent, and they're all track fans. Amazingly, though, they're track fans who don't get to see the actual running of the largest track meet in the nation. Koch only sees maybe a couple races a day when he takes a rare breather, and that's about the norm for these people. But that doesn't seem to phase these officials. Koch says that 90 percent of the clerks are multi-year veterans of the Relays. And if you pore through old Relays programs, you'll see the same names among the list of officials, year after year. When Koch started officiating, the late Jim Tuppeny (Relays director from 1970-1987) told him that he was signing up for at least 25 years. Of course, Tupp wasn't serious, but that just happens to be the general path these officials take. Maybe it has something to do with being part of that clockwork. Or maybe it has something to do with being part of a meet that's enveloped by tradition. "There could be two anchor mile relay runners from Philadelphia high schools whose fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers were anchor runners for the same school," Koch tells me yesterday, outside the track at Franklin Field. Just then, a pair of women from Mount St. Mary's try to enter the track, only to be told by an event staff member that they can't do that until 6 p.m. The reason is because Penn's track teams are practicing at this time, but the event staff member tells them in a tone that says, You can't go onto the track because something big is going on right now. Okay, he was a little premature, but the truth is that something big will be going on starting today. And just like the high school distance medley team from Ireland that worked out on the track yesterday afternoon, just like the Jamaican team from Montego Bay relaxing outside Franklin Field, just like that legacy of Philly high school anchor runners, that event staff member will be a part of it. Koch will be a part of it, too, and he'd love to tell me more, but he's got to talk to his fellow assistant clerks. After all, he says, a track meet like this just doesn't run itself.

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