Coach Ed Temple, who built the Tennessee State University women’s track team into an international powerhouse, died Thursday night. He also coached two Olympic teams, leading his runners to 15 gold medals.
“His accomplishments are unparalleled and continue to resonate even today on our campus and with any organization participating in the sport,” TSU president Glenda Glover
said in a statement. “Of the 40 athletes Coach Temple trained and had participate in the Olympics, 100 percent of them received college degrees. This speaks to his greatness and impact. He was a legend of a man.”
One of the athletes he coached at TSU, Wilma Rudolph, became the first American woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympics, in Rome in 1960.
Temple started at TSU in 1953, when coaching at what was then Tennessee A&I was a part time job. He lived in a dorm room and
told WPLN in 2015 he shuttled the team around in his nine-passenger station wagon.
“We didn’t have nothing else. You had to take what you had and do the best with what you could,” he said.
Over his 44-year career, Temple built the Tigerbelles into a juggernaut and took many of his runners to the Olympics. Four years after Rudolph won her three golds, another protégé, Wyomia Tyus, won the 100-meter race and then set a world record in 1968.
But back on campus, she says Temple showed no favoritism.
“I think that was the best thing. Coach Temple never treated his Olympians any different than the girls that did not make the Olympic team,” she says.
Temple is one of just four coaches to be inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.
Last year, a bronze statue was erected outside the new Nashville Sounds stadium. He’s down on one knee, stopwatch in hand.
Ed Temple just celebrated a birthday this week. He was 89.
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