What job do you give the person that has done a little of everything?
Teacher, of course. Joshua Wimberley has many certifications and life experiences, but now has his focus on the students and athletes at Livingston High School.
Wimberley grew up in West Texas, going to school at Andrews, a Class 4A high school. There, he played football, baseball and soccer. He attended St. Thomas University, where he participated in rugby.
After school, he served as a firefighter for 15 years, retiring from the Odessa Fire Department in 2015. Jumping back into the fire, he then started a teaching career.
“My fire career ended a little earlier than I wanted,” Wimberley explained. “I actually fell through a roof on a house fire and had to have a knee replacement and shoulder replacement, so I ended up taking a medical retirement. My career ended about 10 years ahead of schedule, but the city was really good to me and took good care of me. We were working a house fire, and my partner and I were cutting ventilation. It collapsed and it was a freak accident more than anything. Our intervention team was able to get in there and get us out and taken care of. We both ended up separating our shoulders. My knee, I tore some ligaments.”
The hospital stay was short, according to the coach, but recovery in physical therapy was around nine months.
"As far as I'm concerned, it is trading one form of public service for another," he said of making the conversion into teaching.
Wimberley, a former paramedic, also has experience teaching health science, and will be doing the same at Livingston. He will also help out with the speech and debate team for UIL competition.
He started teaching at Odessa’s Bonham Middle School, leading life science and robotics classes, while coaching soccer and cross country. He moved over to Midland Lee (now Midland Legacy), where he taught video game design and coached the speech and debate team.
If it seems as though Wimberley has dabbled in a bit more than cross country, it's because he has.
"Life's not interesting if you're not challenging yourself, so I like to go out and find new things to do and see what I can learn. I've been kind of testing the waters on a lot of different things. I have certifications in about half a dozen different subjects.
"I'm coming out of a big (Class) 6A. My wife is actually teaching on campus with me, as well. Vanessa is a financial math teacher, so we are coming as a match set. We are empty nesters. Our youngest boy just graduated last year and next month, we are packing him up and taking him over to (Texas A&M University). We have two other boys, one went Air Force and one went Navy, and we have two daughters as well. One is studying music and one is studying finance."
The coach said he doesn't know much of Livingston's cross country history, but feels as though that could be an advantage.
"It's really a blank slate to me and I'm kind of glad for it. I didn't want to come in with any kind of preconceived notions. I'm looking forward to meeting my kiddos here in a couple of weeks. We're going to start off with what amounts to a family meeting of what it looks like to run cross country for my version of the Livingston Lions. We'll see if that meshes with what their expectations are, and we are going to go from there.
"Cross country is not a standalone sport for most of the kids. It is a conditioning sport for everything. If you can't run, you can't really do an athletic event that we've got. A lot of times we get overlooked as a program because everybody thinks of us as just a conditioning season for the kids that are not in their primary sport. My big deal is I want the kids to understand that cross country can be more than a conditioning program. There are a ton of scholarships that go unawarded at universities all over the country for cross country runners, because nobody thinks about it. I want to talk to the kids and I want to talk to the parents about the idea that this can be more than just what we do in the offseason.
"I don't know what the school's history has been as far as their focus or where we were willing to go to see more competitive programs, but I want my kids to be able to go to Vidor because it's tradition, but I also want to be able to go down and run in Texas City. I want to go to College Station and let the kids see what it looks like to run at Nike South, where college prospect kids are running. I want to give them the opportunity to see a higher tier than maybe they've been exposed to in the past."
Assisting in girls soccer and with distance runners in track, Wimberley should remain busy throughout the year. His focus in soccer will primarily be on defense and at goalie, where he has experience.
Before arriving in Polk County, Livingston was just an interesting spot on the map for the two teachers. They took the job with the school before seeing the area.
"I didn't know a lot about Livingston. I accepted this job over a Zoom call and had never actually been into the community. I had been on Facebook pages and Zoom calls and my wife and I looked at it and said that's where we want to be.
"We knew we wanted to come back to East Texas, and I knew I wanted to be in the Houston area. We’ve vacationed down at Lake Conroe pretty extensively over the last three or four years during the summers. We would rent a place down there on the lake. I love the lake and I want to be on the water just as much as I possibly can. We're living up in Onalaska and we were real blessed to find a rental house that got us on the water. I wanted to be in this wet, green community that is so different from what we experienced in Midland."
He is excited about possible growth the area could experience over the next few years.
"What we're seeing in the Livingston area has us excited about investing in this community — not just financially, but also just personally. We're seeing a lot of the same markers that we saw in Conroe five or six years ago, that this community is poised for growth. I feel that we are going to see the same type of explosion in the community here that Conroe and The Woodlands have seen over the last three or four years. We want to be a part of it."
