No looking back

For a fleeting moment, the memories stirred before Justin Strand snapped back to reality. “I’m not competitive in athletics at this time, though I do think about it when I’m watching the Olympics,” he said. “Other than chasing my children around the backyard, that’s it. I put all my energy into my job and my family. There isn’t a lot of time for anything else.”

Not that he’s complaining.

The former Gonzaga Prep football and track star has an ideal life – a satisfying job and a growing young family.

He is vice president and director of database development for FactSet Research Systems, a financial information service company in Norwalk, Conn., and the father of three young boys, Joel, 3, Jared, 1, and Jackson, 4 weeks.

Two moments in his senior year at Prep define the Coeur d’Alene native.

The first came in football, when Bullpups coach Don Anderson asked him to move to middle linebacker when he was poised to break a significant number of major Greater Spokane League rushing records.

“Even then it didn’t seem important to me and it still doesn’t,” Strand said in a telephone interview from his office. “I remember having the conversation with Coach Anderson and being impressed with the way he explained the needs of the team versus the need of the individual. He told me that’s what the team needed and it was the best position for me if I moved on to play college football.

“True enough. When I was recruited, only Cal was interested in me as a running back; everyone else made it very clear I would be a linebacker.”

And he was a tough one, which he showed by adding the state high school shot put title in 1993 to the discus titles he won in 1992 and ’93 despite breaking the pinky finger on this throwing hand on his first attempt.

Unfortunately, injuries also defined his career at Stanford.

Strand was a special teams player and backup linebacker who had three starts as a freshman and was penciled in to be a starter the next year. He had a “little work” done on a knee and all went well until an injury in the second week ended his season.

“I had a number of knee surgeries and by the time spring football rolled around the doctors said I was pretty much done,” he said. “It was very difficult. The big reason for my opportunity at the school was to participate in football. That’s what you did … my friends were on the team. It was never an option to stay involved.”

He is very grateful to then- new Cardinal coach Tyrone Willingham, who had replaced Bill Walsh, for allowing Strand to become a graduate assistant, a position he held for three seasons.

Though it involved a lot of work and walking a fine line with his friends who still played, Strand loved it and did well enough that Willingham was encouraging him to make it a profession.

“I thought long and hard about it,” he said, though he had completed an undergraduate degree in economics and a post-graduate business degree. “I also got to thinking about school, all this education. I thought of myself as a business person” and the five hard years he had spent preparing for a career.

“I thought there was something out there for me besides athletics. I owed it to myself to go out and see what the world had for me. I walked away from football, focused on my career.”

Strand also had to walk away from track and field. The Prep record holder in the shot and disc was a two-time All-American in the hammer throw who, in the rugged Pac-10, had competed against an Olympic gold medalist and had teammates who would make the Olympics. He did go to the trials for the Atlanta Games in 1996 but graduation in 1998 took him out of the Olympic cycle.

“I have no regrets,” he said. “I could have hung on to track and field for two more years. Maybe I could have made a world championships. Hind-sight is 20-20 but it’s more nostalgia than anything else. I enjoyed it. I would go back and relive it at a moment’s notice, it was that much fun. But I don’t regret the decisions.”

Strand went to work for a new business and waited for his girlfriend, Stanford heptathlete Joy Goff, an Oregon native, to graduate. They were married in 2001 and four years ago moved to Connecticut.

“With the promotion came the move,” he explained. “As we were moving, literally, we learned Joy was expecting our first child. That added a little drama to what we were going through.”

Fortunately they found a perfect small community nearby, Ridgefield.

“It’s very family oriented, good schools,” he said. “We got into that New England small-town atmosphere. Overall we’re happy. It’s a much different lifestyle than San Francisco for raising a family. I can’t say either one of us enjoy the big city; we’re not really metropolitan individuals. Although I’m in Manhattan a lot for my job, the best part is getting on the train and leaving.”

Though they miss the Northwest, the job is so perfect a move back isn’t in the immediate future.

“I love my job, love the company,” he said. “It’s one of those jobs, if I could have dreamt it up while I was back at Stanford, this is it.”