More Than a Coach

By Naperville Magazine
May 2026 View more Books

By Jeff Banowetz

Maureen McKane didn’t know anything about Wilber Walters when she met him at a library event in 2021. She didn’t know that he was the founder of the Sundowners Track Club in Aurora, had coached at six different high schools, and was a leader in civil rights causes in the area. But after talking to Walters for a few minutes, she could tell he was an excellent storyteller.

McKane, a former columnist for the Aurora Beacon News, asked Walters if they could meet again. “And we’ve been meeting weekly ever since,” she says.

The now 97-year-old Walters is the subject of McKane’s first book, Walters Way: A Coach, His Runners, and His Race. It chronicles Walters’s success in Aurora on the track, particularly with his founding of the Sundowners Track Club, one of the most successful in the country. But the book also dives deeper into Walters’s life in segregated America, his journey to Aurora, and his life’s work of improving race relations. McKane, a retired psychotherapist, found so much of interest that she thought his story needed to be told.

“He’s led such a unique life,” she says. “But it also shows the day-to-day experiences of being Black in a white world…It’s hard for young people to understand what it was like, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s such an important story to tell.”

Photos: Maureen McKane