It is with regret that we have to announce the death of former Sussex champion and founder of the Phoenix Athletic Club Matt Paterson. Matt died in Australia on Saturday at the age of 74.
Paterson was one of the leading Sussex middle distance and cross-country runners in the sixties and seventies first with the Eastbourne Rovers and then with the Brighton & Hove Club where he led the Brighton & Hove team to become the first-ever Sussex club to win the Southern senior Cross-country Championship. He was also a Sussex champion winning the County 20-mile Road Race title and the 10,000m champion at Bognor, the last time the race was held on grass. He was also to win four successive Sussex 5000m championships and make many appearances in County Cross-country teams.
He was not the only Paterson to become a County champion however, his first wife, Lynne and daughter Lorraine were top Sussex tennis players and both won Sussex age-group titles.
Matt was also a coach to a group to several of the top Brighton & Hove young middle-distance runners of the time including Jon Bigg, now the leading Phoenix Coach.
A trip to America in the seventies, with an accent on the individual’s development and the athletes choosing their own paths within a performance-focus, persuaded him that that was the route to follow. He became resistant to Club team managers approaching his coaching group to complete for club teams.
Matt was a primary school teacher at Patcham. He developed a few youngsters and, living just a few hundred yards away from Steve Ovett, became his training companion on many of Ovett's training runs and support for some of his races.
After Steve became an Olympic Champion, Matt decided to set up a Club for promising middle-distance runners, broke away from Brighton & Hove, took his training group with him, and persuaded his friend to join him.
Thus, Phoenix was formed in 1981 and quickly attracted other would be top runners to join them. They have developed several International, national and English Schools champions, like Jon Bigg and his son Finley, Bridget Smyth, Johan Boakes, Beth Kidger and Charlie Grice, who competed in the 2016 Olympics.
Matt left his teaching post and turned to coaching in Scandinavia, before following Steve Ovett to Australia, where he continued his coaching and work with athletics.
Our sympathies are extended to his family and many friends.