KU's championship-winning track and field coach will lead U.S. men in the Paris Olympics

A University of Kansas coach will achieve one of coaching’s highest honors in the Paris Summer Olympics later this year.

On Tuesday, Stanley Redwine was named head coach of Team USA men’s track and field.

“I’m definitely honored,” said Redwine, who is in his 24th season at the helm of the KU track and field and cross country programs.

“When I’m able to represent our people and help our athletes personally, it even means more,” he said at a news conference Tuesday night.

Redwine previously served on the international stage as the USA men’s coach at the 2022 IAAF World Outdoor Championships, and a USA assistant coach for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“It was a situation that was good that got better,” he said.

Redwine is also a former All-American at the University of Arkansas, a five-time Big 12 Coach of the Year, and has coached 20 individual champions, 240 All-Americans, and 12 Olympians while at Kansas, according to his official KU biography. He formerly coached the University of Tulsa and was an assistant coach at Arkansas.

Former Kansas Relays Meet Director Tim Weaver of Shawnee, Kansas, an executive with an agricultural technology company, will join Redwine in Paris as Team USA's event manager.

"I don't have words to express how special it is to share this with Stanley," Weaver said. "Over the years, he has been my coach, a role model as a husband and father, a boss, a colleague and now a partner in these Olympic adventures."

As the head coach of the men’s Olympic team, Redwine will lead and help organize a large number of athletes who have their own personal coaches at training venues around the country.

“Someone has to do all those things that coaches do on a daily basis that the personal coaches don’t do every day,” said Redwine.

“We have a sprints and hurdles coach, we have a throws coach, we have a jumps coach,” Redwine said. “My responsibility is to organize all of them.”

Redwine’s particular expertise is working with middle distance runners such as former KU standout Bryce Hoppel, who last weekend won a gold medal in the 800-meter distance at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland.

Though Redwine has extensive experience working first-hand with athletes at international meets, he said he watched “every second” of last weekend’s championships on TV for the first time.

“It’s an honor to see those athletes compete as well as they did,” said Redwine. “Especially our own Bryce Hoppel.”

Hoppel, a 26-year-old from Midland, Texas, capped his KU career in 2019 with an NCAA championship in the indoor and outdoor 800. The only former Jayhawk with a better time in that distance is the great Jim Ryun.

When working with Hoppel and other elite athletes on the international stage, Redwine said he’s most impressed by their personalities.

“The thing that you find out first and foremost: They’re human just like everyone else,” he said. “The things they find funny, we find funny as well.”

“They’re just super-talented. They’re down-to-earth people that enjoy what they’re doing,” he said.

The Paris Olympics start on July 26 and run through Aug. 11.