Anyone who coaches for more than 50 years is bound to have at least one amazing story among a lifetime of memories.
Ron Helmer certainly gained one in 2013, prompting his own athletic director to say, “If it was a movie, you’d think it was too corny to be true.”
As Helmer prepared his Indiana men’s cross country team for the Big Ten Championships that fall, he was recovering from months of treatment for cancer and kidney failure. The stunning moment came on race day as his Hoosiers came from seemingly nowhere to win the program’s first team title in 33 years.
“I don’t know why that happened,” Helmer said. “I really don’t. I just know that it did.”
That’s just one of countless success stories in his Hall of Fame coaching career, which spanned 54 years (37 collegiately) before retiring at the end of the 2023 track & field season. Helmer passed away on July 4, 2024, at the age of 77.
Collegiately, Helmer had two coaching stops – 16 years as Director of Track & Field and Cross Country at Indiana after 21 years at Georgetown, where he began as a part-time volunteer and rose to positions of assistant coach and associate head coach before eight years as Director of Track & Field and Cross Country.
His athletes at both programs had great success, perhaps highlighted most by high jumper Derek Drouin, whose collegiate career culminated with him winning The Bowerman in 2013. Drouin also had tremendous post-collegiate triumphs, which included Olympic gold and silver medals. The Canadian won five of the six NCAA titles by Hoosier athletes under Helmer’s coaching/direction, joining Andy Bayer (2012 outdoor 1500).
Helmer’s memorable 2013 Big Ten men’s cross country title had company with a trio of men’s indoor track & field crowns as he mentored a total of 52 individual conference champions in cross country, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field.
Helmer was named Big Ten coach of the year the four times his Hoosiers won conference crowns, and he also earned USTFCCCA Mid-Atlantic Region Coach of the Year awards three times for women’s cross country while he was at Georgetown.
His Hoya athletes won four NCAA titles – Joline Staeheli (1996 indoor mile), Miesha Marzell (1996 outdoor 1500) and two women’s indoor distance medley relays (1997, 1999). He guided Hoya athletes to 213 Big East titles and 15 total team titles in cross country or track & field, and in 2019 he was inducted to the Georgetown Athletic Hall of Fame.
Helmer grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas, and the first Hall of Fame to induct him was his alma mater, Southwestern (Kan.), in 2004 (as an athlete he was team cross country or track captain six times). He joined older brother Jim, an earlier inductee as a NAIA Cross Country Hall of Fame coach for the Moundbuilders. The two are among seven members of the Helmer family to graduate from Southwestern, whose track is named the Helmer Family Track.