Donald Robert Green (February 5, 1920,

Toulon, Illinois Toulon is a city in Stark County, Illinois, United States. The population was 1,292 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Stark County. Toulon is part of the Peoria, Illinois Metropolitan Statistical Area, and is the northwestern terminu ...

– March 22, 1995,

Ventura County, California Ventura County () is a county in the southern part of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 843,843. The largest city is Oxnard, and the county seat is the city of Ventura. Ventura County comprises the Oxn ...

) was the architect of the track and field team at

California Lutheran University California Lutheran University (CLU, Cal Lutheran, or Cal Lu) is a private university in Thousand Oaks, California. It was founded in 1959 and is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but is nonsectarian. It opened in 1960 ...

. Green coached 44 students that received

All-American honours The All-America designation is an annual honor bestowed upon an amateur sports person from the United States who is considered to be one of the best amateurs in their sport. Individuals receiving this distinction are typically added to an All-Am ...

during his 21 years at Cal Lutheran. He has also coached football and track at Pomona High School, leading the track team there to an 117-meet winning streak. After twenty years at Pomona, he became head coach for California Lutheran's track team, which had never won a meet. He brought the team to 98 wins in a row over the next fifteen seasons while competing in the

National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) established in 1940, is a college athletics association for colleges and universities in North America. Most colleges and universities in the NAIA offer athletic scholarships to its stu ...

(NAIA). Besides being the head track coach at California Luthran, he was also an assistant football coach at there for nine years and the athletic director for five years in the 1970s. He filed an age-discrimination claim after he was forced to retire in 1991. Under his tenure at California Lutheran, men’s track and field remained a perennial winner in the NAIA. In 1981, the team won the NAIA District III championship, and the track stars annually competed in national events. 1984 was one of the college’s best years in the national championship: Matt Carney finished sixth in the decathlon and earned an All American honor with 6,269 points. In sprint relays, the team finished in sixth place with a time of 42,2 fielding a team of Ken Coakley, Roger Nelson, Maurice Hamilton and Troy Kuretich all earning

. Green was inducted into Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame in 1992, the

CIF-SS The California Interscholastic Federation-Southern Section (CIF-SS) is the governing body for high school athletics in most of Southern California and is the largest of the ten sections that comprise the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF ...

Sports Hall of Fame in 1973, and the

Mt. San Antonio College Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) is a public community college in southern California, located in Walnut in eastern Los Angeles County. It offers more than 260 degree and certificate programs, 25 support programs, and more than 50 studen ...

Relays Hall of Fame in 1972. One of his athletes was

Bob Seagren Robert Seagren (born October 17, 1946) is a retired American pole vaulter, the 1968 Olympic champion. A native of Pomona, California, Seagren was one of the world's top pole vaulters in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He won six National AAU ...

, a gold medalist in the 1968 Olympic Games.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Green, Don 1920 births 1995 deaths Athletics (track and field) coaches California Lutheran University faculty University of Southern California alumni People from Toulon, Illinois