TOP COLLEGE TRACK TOWN, SAYS FAREWELL TO TOP TRACK COACH

This is Elliott Denman’s salute to Fred Samara, the long time coach of Princeton. Fred Samara is one of the finest coaches in our sport. I met Fred during the early 1990s when Fred and Harry Marra were launching the VISA Decathlon program. A 1976 Olympian, 

TOP COLLEGE TRACK TOWN
SAYS FAREWELL TO TOP TRACK COACH
By ELLIOTT DENMAN

Question: Over the years, which college town in America stands atop the podium as home to residents and guests coursing serious track and field through their veins?

Eugene, Oregon? Ann Arbor, Michigan? Des Moines, Iowa?

Gainesville, Florida? Austin, Texas?

Let me tell you they’re all Johnnies-Come-Lately on the collegiate track and field map.

Let me remind you that they’ve been doing this running-jumping-throwing thing in Princeton, New Jersey, for a century and a half. And they’re still very much at it.

Princeton University has been fielding track and field teams since 1873.

The Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America – you know, the IC4A – staged its first meet in 1876. The first team champion: the Princeton University Tigers. The first Tiger individual winner: J.W. Mann, champion in both the shot put…and baseball throw.

Team USA at the first Modern Olympic Games – Athens 1896 – was almost all men of Princeton (oh, with a handful of Harvard guys) and organized by Princeton history professor William Milligan Sloane. The Games’ first double winner: Princeton’s Robert Garrett, in the shot put and discus. USA’s first International Olympic Committee member? William Milligan Sloane.

The second Olympic 100-meter champion: Princeton’s Frank Jarvis in 1900.

America’s first great outdoor meet spectaculars: Those sensational Princeton Invitationals of the 1930s (featuring such greats as Glenn Cunningham, Jack Lovelock, Sydney Wooderson, and Princeton’s own Bill Bonthron) racing before vast crowds at Palmer Stadium.

Jesse Owens?? His route to quadruple golden glory at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games was built on his epic performances at the ’36 National AAU’s at Palmer Stadium.

Over the years, Palmer Stadium had been the scene of nine world-record performances.

All this while Princeton’s own varsity teams (coached by suchnotables as Keane Fitzpatrick, Matt Geis, Pete Morgan and Larry Ellis) kept their Tigers in the sport’s highest echelons,for years and years more.

All this, too, is by way of saying that the last 46 years of Princeton men’s track – under…