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Profile: Cyrus Jones
Man on track
By Greg Johnson

If you receive a nickname from Cyrus Jones, you know you’ve made the Lincoln (Pennsylvania) men’s and women’s track and field/cross country teams.

When he arrived on campus in 1974, Jones started the tradition of giving monikers to his student-athletes. More than three decades later, the custom continues.

“The kids live and die with those nicknames,” said Jones, who is in his 35th season leading the Lions’ track teams. “They get tattoos with their nicknames on them, and most of the other kids on campus don’t know their real names. I try not to duplicate the nicknames, but there may be a couple through the years.”

He also has provided a blueprint for his student-athletes to be champions on and off the field. Jones has guided Lincoln to 17 national championships (seven men’s outdoor, six men’s indoor, three women’s outdoor and one women’s indoor) and coached more than 300 all-Americans.

Not bad for a man who didn’t know anything about the sport when he began coaching it.

Jones originally wanted to be Lincoln’s baseball coach, but instead he was hired to teach physical education and run the track and field/cross country programs.

“I didn’t even know how to keep score in cross country,” said Jones, who played baseball at Florida A&M, where he was a teammate of future major leaguer Hal McRae.

He made a phone call to friend Tommie Smith, who won the 200-meter dash in the 1968 Summer Olympics, for advice. Smith at the time was the track and field coach at Oberlin, which is in the same Ohio city where Jones worked as a probation officer.

Jones read books and attended track and field coaching clinics. He also watched other track and field coaches such as the legendary James “Jumbo” Elliott, who guided the program at Villanova for 47 years.

“Elliott didn’t know me at all,” said Jones, who served in the Army during the Vietnam War after graduating from Florida A&M in 1968. “Whenever we went to track meets, I always stood near him and listened to him. He gave me my pattern of coaching.”

While he sought advice from those within the field, he couldn’t admit to anyone that he didn’t know how cross country meets were scored. Again, he bought books and studied results from previous meets before he became coach at Lincoln.

“My fear going into the first cross country meet I coached was taking down the times and scores,” Jones said. “That was frightening to me. I never asked anyone. I did it all on my own by reading about it. It took a good two weeks before I was comfortable.”

Jones, who used the G.I. Bill to earn a master’s degree in physical education at Indiana, was 28 years old when he stepped onto the campus at Lincoln. The athletics department had track programs, but there were fewer than 10 competitors on the team. Once word spread that Jones was looking for people to join, more than 60 prospects showed up, and he has continued to build the program ever since.

“It was so exciting – I could barely go home and sleep,” Jones said. “I am a loudmouth, and I got people interested in joining the team.”

Even though his teams often ended up on the short end of the final scores, Jones slowly began to make his mark with the track and field programs.

“We were going to meets and running against larger schools,” Jones said. “They would ridicule us and beat us soundly. It gave us motivation to say, ‘It won’t be like this all the time.’ But I never had a clue that our track program would excel the way it has.”

The Lincoln men’s team advanced to NCAA championships competition for the first time in 1979 and won its first national title in 1985.

“We had to win the mile relay, which was the last event, to win the championship,” Jones said. “Our team didn’t necessarily have the top runners in their events, but they were a strong group.”

The championships kept coming on a regular basis during the next 23 seasons, including the 2007 men’s indoor national title.

The 64-year-old Jones, who still goes for training runs with his student-athletes, has spent his life giving young people an education in the classroom, on the athletics field and in life.

“I stress to all the kids who’ve been on my teams that when you want to do something, you can do anything,” Jones said. “I love the camaraderie. I get calls from the kids during the summer. They come by my office to tell me what’s going on in their lives.”

Jones is a tenured professor at Lincoln, where he teaches health and physical education. He also served as athletics director for 20 years, until 2005.

“Coaching is teaching, and I enjoy teaching immensely,” Jones said. “You have to win in the classroom and everywhere else in order to succeed in life.”

Jones has no thoughts of slowing down.

“Maybe I can go as long as Joe Paterno,” he quipped.

That means the life lessons and the nicknames will continue at Lincoln.