NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Althea Thomas, director of Vanderbilt cross country and track and field, announced Friday the hiring of Harold Rose as an assistant coach. He will primarily work with pole vault and high jump student-athletes.
Rose most recently served as a high performance specialist, working with Olympic sport athletes in Ontario, Canada. He has coached Olympian and World Championships bronze medalist Gavin Smellie and World Championships bronze medalist Dontae Richards-Kwok. For the past six years, he has coached for Team Ontario and has guided several Canadian juniors to national teams and national records.
Before Rose’s work in Canada, he was an assistant coach for men’s and women’s sprints, jumps and hurdles at Florida A&M. His recruiting efforts with the Rattlers helped to sign several student-athletes who aided the team in winning the Southwestern Athletic Conference title in 2018, including the No. 1 boys’ 400 meters sprinter the country that year in Leander Forbes.
From 2012 to 2016, Rose worked as a high-performance consultant where he installed training systems and mentored coaches for Sanders Elite Training Performance and Titus Sports Academy in Florida. During that time, he was selected for the 2015 World Youth coaching staff and worked with multi, hurdles and pole vault student-athletes. He also led the Big Bend Vault Club where he developed Pole Vault State champion Sebastian Campos, Golden South champion Nicole Greene and New Balance Nationals 60-meter hurdles runner-up Braxton Canady. In this role, he also supported Jordan Fields in the heptathlon at the World Youth Championships qualifier.
As a student-athlete, Rose attended Wolfson High School in Jacksonville, Florida, and went on to compete at Bethune-Cookman University. There, he reset the indoor heptathlon record for three consecutive years. A knee injury ended his career as an athlete but helped to jump start his career in coaching.
He is married to Sorayah Rose, and the two have two children, Amelia and Asher Rose.