How many people have been recognized by two sitting U.S. Presidents?
Josh Culbreath was – once for his athletic career (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959) and another for his coaching accomplishments (Bill Clinton, 1994), which have now landed him in the USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame.
Culbreath’s first and only coaching position didn’t come about easily. A native of the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, Culbreath was being courted in the late 1980s by two Philadelphia natives – Central State University President Arthur Thomas and Athletic Director Billy Joe – hoping to lure Culbreath to Wilberforce, Ohio.
The Marauders hadn’t seen glory days in track & field since the 1960s with the likes of Martin McGrady (world record setter in the 600 yards) and long jumper Clifton Mayfield (an NCAA champion).
“They had to do quite a bit of talking to get me to come here because I had only been in Ohio one other time in my life,” Culbreath explained in 1989 to Dave Long of the Dayton Daily News. “That was in Dayton in 1953 when I won my first AAU national championship in a meet at Welcome Stadium.”
“But they’ve got me here and the word is out that Central State is beginning to build in track again. I know this is football country, but I think we can build a nice little track empire here.”
An empire it became indeed.
In just eight years on the job, Culbreath led the Marauders to otherworldly heights: a total of ten NAIA track & field teams titles and eight other runner-up finishes; and his athletes won a total of 91 event titles. His women won four consecutive NAIA outdoor titles from 1991 to 1994.
The zenith of the Culbreath era at CSU came in 1993, when the Marauders unprecedentedly swept the men’s and women’s team titles at both the NAIA Indoor and Outdoor Championships. The Marauders nearly pulled it off again in 1994 when they won two of the four national titles and finished runner-up twice (men won the indoor crown and finished second outdoors; women took runner-up honors indoors and won the outdoor title). Culbreath and the CSU track & field teams were later honored by President Clinton in the White House Rose Garden in June 1994.
Four of his athletes competed in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, led by Deon Hemmings, who won the 400-meter hurdles in becoming the first Jamaican woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Another of his standouts was Carolin Sterling, the first woman to win five NAIA indoor event titles in amassing a total of 12 with her outdoor exploits.
Culbreath left CSU in the summer of 1996 – when the school shuttered its entire athletic program for financial reasons – for the athletic director position at Morehouse College. Several years later, when CSU brought back its athletic program, Culbreath’s son Jahan was brought on as the track & field coach. Jahan would later become CSU’s athletic director and now serves as an administrator at the university.
Jahan discovered the first time his dad had been recognized by a U.S. President. After Josh’s death on July 1, 2021 at the age of 88, Jahan found a scrapbook and turned the pages to find something for the first time.
“It was a letter of congratulations – dated December 12, 1959 – from President Dwight Eisenhower,” Jahan told Tom Archdeacon of the Dayton Daily News.
“They’d had a special day in Norristown for my dad and Al Cantello (the Olympic javelin thrower and longtime U.S. Naval Academy coach who was inducted into the USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame in 2013). Eisenhower wrote a special note to Dad.”
Culbreath had just won the second of his two golds in the Pan-American Games earlier that summer, the last of his major achievements as a 400-meter hurdler despite standing just 5-foot-7. He wasn’t a stranger to global medals, as he famously won bronze in that same event at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games as part of a 1-2-3 American sweep.
The elder Culbreath competed collegiately at Morgan State under the direction of USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame member Edward P. Hurt. Culbreath won three consecutive AAU national titles in the 440-yard hurdles between 1953 and 1955, years in which the event wasn’t held at the national collegiate level.
Among the Halls of Fame which have inducted Culbreath are Morgan State University Athletics (1975), Central State University Marauder Athletics (2007), United States Marine Corps Sports (2008) and Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (2013). He was an inaugural member of the Penn Relays Wall of Fame in 1994 and was the meet’s first three-time winner of the 400 hurdles.