IU Men’s Track and Field Coach Ron Helmer has brought plenty of success to Bloomington in the past 10 years. After leading one of best indoor seasons in school history, Helmer was recognized by coaches around the conference and the region for the job he has done.
After the Hoosier men secured the Big Ten indoor championship in late February, Helmer received the conference’s Men’s Coach of the Year award. Last week he was honored by the United States Track and Field and Cross-Country Coaches Association as the Great Lakes Regional Coach of the Year.
Helmer said it was nice to be recognized because the awards were voted on by other coaches. He said people are seeing the work the team is doing and appreciating it, but to Helmer, these awards are not the important thing.
“I’ve probably had more people congratulate me on a coach of the year award than on wining the Big Ten Championship,” Helmer said. “For me, the only thing that matters is that we won and that the team came together and produced a winning effort.”
These weren’t the first awards in Helmer’s lengthy coaching history. He began his coaching career in Virginia, where he coached high school cross-country for 12 years and was named the state’s Boy’s Cross-Country Coach of the Decade during the 1980s.
The most important part of coaching to Helmer has always been winning, and the 10 state championships he won in his high school coaching days prove his success in that aspect of the job.
The winning tradition stayed with him in his move from high school coaching to the collegiate level. Helmer was a part of the Georgetown coaching staff for roughly 20 years, eight of which he spent at the helm as head coach, before coming to IU.
During his time with the Hoyas, Helmer helped produce more than 200 conference champions. His knack for winning was evident as he played a role in building 37 Big East Championship teams.
In May 2007, Indiana brought Helmer to Bloomington, and the coach said he believes the team has gotten to a good place in his time in Bloomington, but it needs to work even harder to sustain where they are.
“We’ve done this before,” Helmer said. “This level of success is what we intended to be every year, but after we won in 2012, we really did take a dip. We were not the team that we anticipated and expected to be.”
Helmer has been here before, and so has the team. In his fourth season at IU, he was named the 2010-11 Great Lakes Regional Coach of the Year in a successful season that consisted of two top-10 NCAA finishes.
The following year, in the 2011-12 season, the men’s team won the indoor conference meet and finished sixth in the National Championships. His cross-country team also had a standout season by finishing second in the Big Ten.
Helmer said the team is finally back to where it wants to be after winning the indoor conference meet in 2017 for the first time since that 2012 championship.
“So many young people were critical to our success this season,” Helmer said. “Now that we are back at this level, our goal is to sustain this effort and make this an every-year thing.”
Shortly after the new year, Helmer laid out his hopes for this season’s team. He said he wanted his guys to come together as one team and for his second-tier group to have a more focused commitment, but most importantly he wanted to create a winning atmosphere.
Helmer’s expectations extended to the coaching staff as well as the athletes.
“I had a meeting with my coaches before the season,” Helmer said. “I told them I wanted them to coach strength, speed and fitness, but above all else, I want them to coach winning.”
This type of mindset stuck with the players and coaches, and resulted in an indoor Big Ten Championship. This indoor season success started in late-2016 when the team performed well in the Hoosier Open.
“I think we hit the ground running,” Helmer said. “ We had some guys do well in that December meet, but then we came back and beat Tennessee and Purdue in dual meets. After that, we just started putting out school record performances.”
Helmer said every meet had some significant highlights the team could get excited about, but his favorite part was that it wasn’t always the same person carrying the load. Junior middle distance runner Daniel Kuhn has broken a number of IU records this season, but Helmer said the other athletes who broke records made him equally proud.
Helmer said he thinks there has been a standard set for both preparation and performance in the wake of the Big Ten title.
“That’s what I want, whether I coach here for one more year or 10 more,” Helmer said. “Being able to sustain this level of team, effort and competitive spirit for years to come is absolutely what I want. We thought we arrived here the first time and that quickly fell apart.”
The Hoosiers still have more possible success coming their way as they head to College Station, Texas, to compete in the 2017 Indoor NCAA Championships this weekend. The men’s side will have participants in four events — the distance medley, 800-meter run, shot put and triple jump.
Helmer said he knows it will take plenty of hard work in order to accomplish this mission.
“As an athlete, it’s impossible to stay the same,” Helmer said. “You either get better or worse. We must become better, which will allow us to sustain this in the future for a number of years.”
