Winner: John McDonnell

By James Dunaway

John McDonnell, one of the most successful track and field coaches the United States has ever seen, is retiring after 36 years as head men’s coach of the University of Arkansas.

His resume includes 42 men’s NCAA team championships—12 outdoor, 19 indoor and 11 cross-country. Nobody else even comes close.

His athletes have won 105 individual NCAA outdoor, indoor and cross-country championships. That is an average of three championships a year!

Of course, that figures. Everybody knows that winning the NCAAs usually depends on a few star athletes—guys who score 10, 15, 20 points—and any coach who can come up with three of those athletes per year is going to win a lot of team championships.

Winning the conference? Now that takes more than just a few studs. Winning the conference requires depth. That is why perhaps the most amazing of all McDonnell’s statistics is this: in the 17 years since Arkansas joined the Southeastern Conference—the toughest conference in track—Arkansas has won 45 out of a possible 50 team championships.

McDonnell was a farm boy in County Mayo, Ireland, studied at a technical school, and became a TV cameraman. For sports, he was a distance runner, good enough to beat the Olympic 5000 meter standard in 1960, but he was ignored by the Irish selectors.

He came to New York in the summer of 1963 “on holiday” to visit a cousin. “I loved the weather.” When he got back to Ireland, it was, of course, raining. Two months later, he was back in New York for good and quickly got a cameraman’s job at a local TV station.

McDonnell ran in local races for the New York A.C. He met Malcolm Robinson, an Irish runner attending Southwestern Louisiana. Next thing John knew, he was a 25-year-old freshman for coach Bob Cole at S.W. La. A year later, Cole had him coaching the team’s distance runners—unofficially, of course, but he was coaching.

In 1969, McDonnell became a U.S. citizen and got his degree (B.A. in Education). He started teaching and coaching at the high school level and was successful enough by 1972 to get “tapped” as cross-country coach at a university than more famous for football and hog-calling than for track and field.

McDonnell got promoted to head coach in 1978. He wanted to win so badly, he tried to get more out of his athletes than they could give—until two of his best athletes, Mike Conley and Frank O’Mara told him, separately, that his pressure was hurting, not helping their performances.

Right then, he realized what has been his mantra ever since: “They want to win. They’ve got enough pressure on them already. The coach doesn’t need to give them any more.”

It took Bill Bowerman, Jumbo Elliott and John Wooden more than a decade to win their first national championships. John McDonnell, who did it in six years, belongs in their company.