‘Here to be the best’

Fresh off transforming North Carolina A&T’s track and field program, champion and former Olympian Duane Ross sets his sights on making Tennessee the top program in the nation as its new head coach.

ANDREW PETERS Sports Editor

When Duane Ross visited Tennessee last spring, he stood in lane five of Tom Black track – the same lane he became an NCAA Champion in while competing for Clemson in the 110m hurdles in 1995.

Walking down that lane, the memories flooded in.

He remembers seeing his coach, Bob Pollock, standing up and telling him to do a victory lap from the brick bleachers that still stand today. He remembers walking down Cumberland Avenue that night to get food with his teammates. During that moment of nostalgia, Ross knew Tennessee was the right fit for him.

“That was a special moment,” Ross said. “The University of Tennessee was in that moment.”

That visit last spring was the first time Ross had been back to Tennessee since his championship performance, and a lot has happened in the years between.

He became a national champion again at the professional level and competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. He also saw his competitive career come to an end after receiving a two-year ban from the U.S. Anti-doping Agency in 2010 for using banned performance-enhancing drugs starting in 2001.

North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university in Greensboro, as the head coach.

Over the past 10 years, Ross has built a track and field empire out of North Carolina A&T.

He has produced 12 Individual/Relay NCAA Championships, 142 combined men’s and women’s All-American honors and two Olympians –one of which is his son, Randolph. He was the 2021 National Coach of the Year and the Southeast Region Coach of the Year a handful of times.

Last season, Ross and his staff came just shy of becoming the first HBCU to win a Division I title in any major sport since 1974, finishing second in the Men’s NCAA Indoor Championships.

He was at the top of the track and field world when athletic director Danny White offered him the head coaching job at Tennessee last spring.

The decision to leave wasn’t easy. Taking the job at Tennessee meant stepping away from a project that was a decade in the making. A project that he was very close to perfecting.

“Building that program from the ground up, 10 years, I had everything in place, exactly where I wanted it,” Ross said. “All of our support staff, all of the resources that we needed, everything was in place.”

But he knew that at a certain point, there would be a time to pass the torch to someone else at A&T and start over somewhere else. He knew it had to happen for the program to continue its growth.

“I believe in necessary endings and creating opportunities for others,” Ross said. “Me leaving A&T after 10 years of what we built there, it was time for someone else to come in and continue that fight of an HBCU winning a national championship. We created an opportunity for the next staff to come in and do that.”

When the time came to leave A&T, he wasn’t going to leave for just any school. It had to be perfect for him, his staff and his family.

“I’ve always told myself – I’ve always told my staff – that if and when I decided it was time to move on from A&T, it would have to be the right environment, the right athletic department, the right team, the right city, the right school,” Ross said. “All of those things just fit.”

The coaching job at Tennessee was an opportunity to start fresh with a team that needed reviving.

2012. When he was offered the job at Tennessee, he saw it as an opportunity to rebuild a program that once was the standard in collegiate track and field.

“This program was huge back when I was in college,” Ross said. “All the Olympic medalists that have come through here – I accept that challenge of putting this program back where it was and even exceeding those things this program did in the past.”

That goal of returning Tennessee to national prominence was a driving factor in why Ross took the job. But he also came because of what Tennessee athletics is building across all sports.

With football returning to national prominence since Josh Heupel was hired in 2021, basketball continuing to hold its place as a consistent top-10 team and baseball on a historic run, Ross saw the Tennessee job as joining something bigger than himself. He wanted to be a part of what is shaping up to be one of the most dominant eras by one school in years.

“We spoke about me willing to be a part of a bigger whole, willing to contribute to the entire athletic department like we did at A&T,” Ross said about a conversation he had with Danny White. “Just like football and basketball inspire other teams, we want to inspire them too. We’re excited about what we’re doing and I’m very excited about this trend upwards.”

And to be a part of the new standard for Tennessee means achieving excellence. Not mediocrity, not mild success, but dominance through and through. That standard is exactly what Ross is shooting for as he begins his first campaign with the Vols.

Either way, Ross won’t accept for his team to sit around and let others do the work for them.

“No one is here to just be takers,” Ross said. “If you’re going to be a part of this great program, this great institution that has so much prestige, men and women, with so much success in track and field, everyone has to contribute to our success one way or another.”

Admittedly, Ross said that his coaching style was a bit of an adjustment for athletes who have been around Tennessee for a while. But the adjustment is one that he believes will lead to greatness.

“I came in with a different kind of energy and a different kind of passion,” Ross said. “And a different kind of expectation. That expectation has been that this is not recreation, but we’re here to win. We’re here to be the best.”

It was that winning mindset – along with the up and down journey that Ross has been on – that led White to believe Ross was the man for the job at Tennessee. Ross knows what it takes to succeed in collegiate track – from an athlete’s standpoint and a coach’s standpoint. He also knows the adversity that it can come with it.

“Tennessee track & field has been all about greatness for most of its history—both men’s and women’s,” White said following Ross’s hiring. “Duane knows what that takes and is poised to restore our program to consistent, elite-level achievement.”

And now Ross is preparing for his first outdoor season with Tennessee the same way he would with North Carolina A&T.

But the forced ending of one chapter led to the beginning of a new one. Ross started his coaching career at the Division III level and soon joined

Tennessee hasn’t won a conference championship in men’s or women’s in over a decade. The program hasn’t seen national success since its glory days in the 90s, when it had dominant teams that Ross remembers racing against when he was in college.

Ross took on the challenge of building something from the ground up at North Carolina A&T in

“We want to be the best competitive Division 1 program in the country hands down, year after year,” Ross said. “We’re very demanding in that aspect.”

He has made that message clear to his athletes. In one of his first meetings with the team after accepting the job at Tennessee, Ross honed in the point that he expected everyone to contribute in some way. Maybe that contribution comes on the track, or maybe it comes in other ways like supporting teammates in practice or before races.

Tennessee is a bigger school in a bigger conference. It has more expensive facilities and more resources than the smaller school Ross was at before. That doesn’t change a thing. He is bringing the same grit and determination that he used to turn A&T into the powerhouse that is today.

“I’m bringing the same work ethic that my staff and I had at A&T,” Ross said. “We’re just going to follow the same blueprint. I don’t think it’s much more magic to it than that.”