Jimmy Carnes

James Jerome Carnes (November 29, 1934 – March 5, 2011) was an American track and field athlete, coach and administrator. A successful coach at the high school, college and international levels, Carnes compiled a 161–11 career dual meet record, highlighted by four college conference championships and six state high school championships. He was the head coach of the U.S. Olympic track & field team and the Florida Gators track and field team, the founder of the Florida Track Club, and a member of the U.S. Track & Field Hall of Fame.

Early years

Jimmy Carnes was born in Eatonton, Georgia. He attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia from 1952 to 1956, where he played for the Mercer Bears basketball team and was a javelin thrower and high jumper for the Bears track and field team. Carnes dated his future wife, Nanette, a Mercer education major whom he knew from Eatonton, while they were undergraduates.

College

In 1962, Carnes became the head cross country and track and field coach at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. From 1965 to 1976, Carnes' Florida Gators track and field teams finished in the top three in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) fifteen times, won two SEC indoor track championships, and compiled a 93–3 overall record in dual meets. Among his many Gators track and field athletes were sixty-five SEC individual champions, four NCAA individual champions and twenty-four All-Americans. Jeff Galloway, Marty Liquori and Frank Shorter. Carnes recruited fifty-five graduate student-athletes for the Florida Track Club by offering several of them assistant coaching positions and helping many of them obtain graduate assistantships within the university to help them continue their graduate studies.

Business ventures

In 1973, Carnes and Liquori co-founded Athletic Attic, one of the nation's first sports equipment chain stores, with an emphasis on running shoes for training and competition. At the peak of the running craze, Athletic Attic had over 165 stores in the United States, Canada, Japan and New Zealand with over $40 million in annual revenue. Carnes resigned as the Gators track coach in September 1976 to focus on his Athletic Attic business interests and his Olympic coaching. The first games were held in 1980, and have been held every year since then. and helped heal a decades-long institutional rift between the AAU and the NCAA. From 1980 to 1984, he served as the first president of The Athletics Congress/USA (now known as USA Track & Field), after it was spun off from the AAU. He was also involved in the formation of TACTRUST, the first step toward open track competition, and worked to guide the sport from amateur to open competition rules.

Honors

Carnes was inducted as a member of the Florida Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1984, and the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame in 2008. He was also inducted into the University of Florida Athletic Hall of Fame as an "honorary letter winner" in 1983. The Gainesville Sports Commission has sponsored an annual championship called the Jimmy Carnes Indoor Track and Field Meet since 2008.

Personal life

Carnes was married to Nanette Carnes, and they were the parents of three sons and a daughter. Carnes was survived by his wife and their children.