Robert H. Johnson spent the summer and early fall of 2000 as one of five assistant coaches for the United States Track & Field Team at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, marking the first time that a Division III coach has been able to make that claim.
Johnson, the 1995 NCAA Division III Cross Country Coach of the Year, spent 37 seasons in charge of the Wabash harriers.
Since 1991, Wabash recorded three top-10 finishes at the NCAA meet while winning five straight Indiana Collegiate Athletic Conference titles (1992-96) and a Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference crown. Johnson's 1995 team registered two perfect scores (15), the first at the GLCA Championships and the second in winning the NCAA Division III Great Lakes Regional.
Johnson, an Honorary Alumnus of the College from the Class of 1977, was named the HCAC Coach of the Year to add to his impressive total of eight ICAC Coach of the Year awards. He has also earned Wabash Coach of the Year honors four times, and he was inducted into the Wabash College Athletic Hall of Fame in 1994.
Even with such honors, Johnson's strength as a coach lies in his world-class relay coaching technique, which is part of the reason he served on the 2000 Olympic staff. Johnson appears at coaching clinics all over the country, including sessions at the United States Track & Field Coaches Association's annual convention, to discuss relay technique and handoffs.
Wabash runners benefit from Johnson's longtime work with the Olympic Development Committee, and from his involvement with two US Junior National Teams. In 1981, he served as an assistant coach at the National Sports Festival in New York. A year later, he coached sprints, relays, and hurdles in Ethiopia as part of the Olympic Solidarity Project. He was the head track coach for the North Team at the 1983 Olympic Sports Festival in Colorado Springs and later served as an assistant for the US Junior National Team which set two world records.
Johnson was the sprint and relay coach for the US Track Team at the 1993 World University Games, helping the 4 x 100 (38.65 seconds) and 4 x 400 (3:02.34) relay teams win Gold Medals. He gave his relay technique clinic to the US Track & Field Coaches Association during its annual meeting in 1994, as well as at the Atlanta convention just prior to the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.
A native of Englewood, New Jersey, Johnson was a track and football standout in high school and later attended the University of Idaho, where he graduated in 1965. Johnson was the 1962 Northwest AAU champion in the 440 and was a finalist at the 1963 NCAA Championships in the 220. He earned his master's in education from Purdue University in 1974. He received an honorary doctorate from Wabash in 2019.
