MOBILE, Ala. - University of South Alabama head cross country/track and field coach Lee Evans announced on Tuesday that the program will lose assistant coach Ron Davis at the end of the month. Davis has accepted a position as assistant women’s track and field coach at Ohio State University.
“I am very thankful for the opportunity to coach at Ohio State, but I am also grateful to the University of South Alabama for allowing me the opportunity to help improve the track and field program here,” Davis said, “Mr. Gottfried and the Athletics Department have done a wonderful job of supporting the efforts of our student-athletes and I am glad that I was able to be apart of the Jaguar family for the past three years.”
Davis became the Jaguars’ assistant cross country/track and field coach in 2003 after spending four years as the head cross country/track and field coach at the University of New Orleans. During his tenure as a Jaguar, Davis coached 66 All-Sun Belt Conference performers and 29 SBC champions between cross country, indoor, and outdoor track. Most notable among his accomplishments were the performances of Vincent Rono and Tonny Okello. Rono won the SBC cross country title, four indoor SBC titles, two outdoor SBC titles on his way to becoming the first Jaguar national champion, winning the NCAA 1500m title in June. Okello became South Alabama’s first two-time cross country All-American and the first Jaguar since the late David Kimani to earn All-American honors twice in the same year, doing so at the NCAA Outdoor Champions where he was eighth in the 5000m.
“Though his presence will be greatly missed considering all the things he has done for our program, I am very pleased that Coach Davis has been afforded the opportunity to be apart of Ohio State’s track and field program,” said Evans, “Ron Davis has been catalyst for this program’s improvement over the last three years and his contributions cannot be replaced.”
Davis began his track career at San Jose State, where he captained the 1962 team to an NCAA Cross Country Championship. That team won the title again in 1963 and in three years only lost once, having finished second at the 1961 NCAA finals.
The New York native later became a student-assistant coach, helping the Spartans capture the 1969 NCAA Outdoor Track Championship. Davis has trained athletes in 11 countries, including the Congo (as a Fulbrighter), Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Tanzania. At the 1980 Olympic Games, Davis coached Filbert Bayi to a silver medal in the 3000m Steeplechase, the first medal in Tanzania's Olympic history. Davis has been instrumental in helping other African athletes receive higher education and athletic training, such as 1991 World Champion and 1996 Bronze Medalist in the 400m hurdles, Samuel Matete of Zambia.
Prior to his arrival in Mobile, Davis guided the University of New Orleans women's cross country program to a fourth-place finish at the 2002 Sun Belt Championship, earning his second all-Louisiana coach of the year honor by the Louisiana Sports Writers Association.
He also led the women's program to a Sun Belt Championship in 2000, the first-ever in school history. During his tenure at UNO, he coached student-athletes to seven individual conference championships and four of his athletes were named to the Sun Belt's All-Time Cross Country Team: Jana Bulirova, Michaela Mannova, Pavlina Vondrakova and Omar Smith.
Before UNO, Davis was the track and field/cross country coach at the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore in Princess Anne, Md.
Davis was also the founder the LaGrange Sports Authority in LaGrange, Ga., a program that supports pre-Olympic training for more than 550 athletes from more than 40 countries. In 1996, 15 athletes from LaGrange qualified and participated in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ga.
