The running track at Seattle Pacific University's Wallace Field has been named in honor of longtime Track and Field coach Ken Foreman. The gesture was solemnized during a special ceremony last Friday morning.
Foreman, who coached track and field for 38 years before retiring from
SPU in 2000, attended the ceremony, along with university president Philip Eaton and athletic director Tom Box.
The newly yclept Coach Ken Foreman Track is located east of SPU's Royal Brougham Pavilion. Part of the funding for the track and for Wallace Field comes from a significant gift from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
"The foundations of success that spawned Seattle Pacific athletics are directly attributable to Coach Ken Foreman," Box asserted. "His tireless quest for excellence set standards of performance that echo through the halls of Royal Brougham Pavilion, and [through the stories] his athletes tell."
During Foreman's years as SPU's track and field coach, his athletes won 26 individual collegiate championships. Twenty-three of his athletes competed internationally, including eight Olympians. Over the course of his career, he held more than a dozen national team coaching assignments in cities all over the world - among them San Sebastian, Spain; Moscow, Russia; Milan, Italy; Mexico City, Mexico; Perth, Australia; and Helsinki, Finland - and coached 108 NCAA All-Americans, accounting for 159 All-America finishes.
Foreman was chosen as the U.S. head coach for the 1980 Summer Olympics, the 1983 World Championships and the 1986 Goodwill Games. He is an inductee of the Washington State Track & Field Coaches Hall of Fame and the Falcon Legends Halls of Fame.
Foreman was also a groundbreaker in women's running. In 1955, he founded the SPU Falcon Track Club for women. As coach, his women's teams finished among the top 10 in the nation 13 times. One of his most famous students is Doris Brown Heritage, five-time world champion, 1964 Seattle Pacific graduate and current Falcon cross country coach. He recently wrote a book about Heritage titled "The Fragile Champion."
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