LAKE FOREST, Ill. - Middle Tennessee head track and field coach Dean Hayes will join his sixth hall of fame when his alma mater, Lake Forest College, includes the legendary coach in its five-member 2009 class of the Lake Forest College Athletic Hall of Fame.
"It always is nice to have something from your alma mater," Hayes said. "This one has special significance to me because it belongs to my mother and father."
As a teenager in Naperville, Ill., Hayes had not imagined going to college, including attending the same school as his father, who graduated from Lake Forest in 1931. Because of the Korean War, he knew his draft board was ripe for deployment; however, Hayes was younger than most kids in his class and thus was granted an extension.
Due to his mother's insistence, he decided on the last possible night to attend Lake Forest for what he thought would be a semester. During that inaugural semester, the Korean War conflict began to decrease, lessening the chances of Hayes being drafted. He was able to stay in college longer than the semester due to the war beginning to cease and because he was a chemistry major.
Hayes, a 1959 graduate of the suburban Chicago school, was a four-year member of the track team for the Foresters. He competed in the mile at the NCAA Mideast Regional as a senior and placed in the 880-yard run at the College Conference of Illinois Championship Meet during his junior campaign. A multi-event participant, he also saw action in the 440-yard run, long jump and triple jump.
The latter two events he turned into his most success as a coach at Middle Tennessee, where he has led the Blue Raider program since 1965.
Hayes graduated from Lake Forest with a bachelor's degree in chemistry before completing his master's degree at Northern Illinois. After a four-year stint as a high school coach, he returned to Lake Forest as an assistant track coach before arriving in Murfreesboro.
His arrival at Middle Tennessee marked the emergence of a new class of track & field competition. He focused his recruiting efforts on the jumps and relays and securing top-notch competitors for his programs. Hayes is credited with opening Blue Raider track & field to minorities and recruiting the school's first international student-athletes.
He has guided the Middle Tennessee program to 29 OVC titles, 15 SBC championships and 18 NCAA Top-25 finishes. Hayes has won 12 Sun Belt Conference Coach of the Year awards in addition to his 15 Ohio Valley Conference Coach of the Year honors, which includes 10 in a row from 1977-86. In 1981, Hayes was named the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Coach of the Year, and was also selected as the NCAA District Coach of the Year outdoors in 1977 and then again in 1981.
Forty-five of his athletes have earned 87 All-American honors, four have become national champions and a number have gone on to compete internationally in the Olympic Games, World University Games and Pan-American Games. There could have been more awards, but Middle Tennessee did not sport a track program from 1987-90. Some of his more notable athletes were NCAA champions Tommy Haynes (1974), Barry McClure (1972, 1973), Dionne Rose (1994) and most recently, Mardy Scales (2003). Hayes also guided Roland McGhee to nine All-American honors, and both McClure and Greg Artis won All-American honors seven times.
Other halls of fame on Hayes' resume include the Blue Raider Hall of Fame (1982), Illinois Sports Hall of Fame (1993), Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame (1994), Mason-Dixon Athletic Club Hall of Fame (2005) and the United States Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame (2008).
Middle Tennessee also recognized him renaming its track and soccer complex in his name this past May, creating the Dean A. Hayes Track and Soccer Stadium.
Hayes will be inducted Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Mohr Student Center on the Lake Forest campus and will be honored at halftime of the Homecoming football game with his fellow inductees later that afternoon.
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