Track's dynamic duo not slowing down

Harter, Bucknam coming off historic year

Arkansas track coaches Chris Bucknam, left, and Lance Harter pose with their SEC championship trophies won during the 2015-16 year.

— Any argument about who is the best head coach on the University of Arkansas campus ends at adjacent offices that overlook the Razorbacks’ outdoor track stadium.

On the left is Chris Bucknam and on the right is Lance Harter. Between them — quite literally — are more trophies, plaques and awards than can be found in any other coach’s office on campus. Before an expansion to the indoor facility allowed the program a permanent home for all of them, national championship trophies were scattered throughout the office. Legend has it one even was used as a doorstop.

The memorabilia still remaining in the offices are too many to list, ranging from Penn Relays wheels to coach of the year plaques, to SEC championship and NCAA runner-up trophies — hardware awaiting a much-needed museum dedicated to Arkansas’ most successful sport.

Bucknam, the eighth-year men’s coach, and Harter, who is in his 26th year coaching the women, added to their impressive haul this year with each winning the Southeastern Conference championships in cross country, indoor and outdoor track & field — otherwise known as the triple crown. It is the second time Arkansas has swept the sports’ conference championship meets. No other SEC program has done it once.

That kind of success is the expectation at Arkansas, which calls itself the Track Capital of the World. That mantra was established during John McDonnell’s unprecedented run of championships — both national and conference — from the 1970s until his retirement in 2008.

Among McDonnell’s most impressive streaks were 12 consecutive NCAA indoor titles between 1984-95, and 34 straight conference championships in cross country spanning the Razorbacks’ final 17 years in the Southwest Conference and first 17 years in the SEC.

After weathering the remnants of NCAA sanctions stemming from a rogue assistant coach, Bucknam has re-established Arkansas as one of the top men’s programs in the NCAA. He has won 17 SEC championships and his first national championship during the 2013 indoor season.

Harter, who was not absent to success in his first two decades at Arkansas, has his program at its strongest point ever with a national title indoors in 2015 and outdoors this season. He and Bucknam are part of an elite group of Razorbacks coaches to ever win a national championship, alongside McDonnell, Frank Broyles and Nolan Richardson.

“If you are a track athlete and you want to win championships/rings, you want Chris Bucknam and Lance Harter as your coach,” Arkansas women’s basketball coach Jimmy Dykes recently proclaimed on Twitter. “Best duo in college track.”

Harter’s Razorbacks have won seven straight conference titles — and nine of the last 11 conference meets — and have finished in the top 10 at eight consecutive NCAA meets, including runner-up this year indoors.

“I’m very unpopular now among my peers,” Harter said. “It feels great. I tell my wife, ‘I’m finding that as we win more and more championships, fewer people are coming up to say congratulations.’ I don’t go to bed at night ever thinking that they’re not laying up and thinking, ‘How are we going to stop this? Do we attack them in cross country, do we attack them indoors or do we attack them outdoors?’”

If any coach on campus can attest to how big an accomplishment is Harter’s streak, it is Bucknam, who won nine straight SEC meets between the 2011 outdoor and 2014 indoor seasons and has had 12 top 10 national team finishes since 2012.

“I know how hard that is and I know it’s not just the coaching, it’s the management and the process of having a full track team,” Bucknam said. “I think that is maybe what gets lost in having those triple crowns. It’s all hands on deck. It’s a lot of moving pieces. There are three coaches managing 50 athletes.”

As can probably be expected for a group that works in such close quarters, the men’s and women’s programs are close-knit. They share workout facilities and charter the same planes to away meets. In multiple instances, they have married, such as senior distance runner Dominique Scott did last year with former men’s distance runner Cameron Efurd, who proposed at an NCAA meet.

And the teams celebrate each other’s accomplishments. When the men finished third at the 2015 NCAA indoor meet at Randal Tyson Track Center, they made their way to the floor to celebrate the trophy presentation with the women, who won their first national championship ever.

“I’ve had people tell me that we’re the only coaching staffs hanging together at a meet,” Bucknam said.

“We are separate programs with different philosophies, but we’re Arkansas, we’re Razorbacks and we’re a united front,” Harter added.

Harter said he tries to put winning so many championships in perspective for his team. It isn’t normal and it isn’t easy.

Track & field and cross country are the only Arkansas female programs to ever win an SEC championship. On the men’s side, football hasn’t won one, and basketball and baseball have combined for one conference tournament title 16 years ago.

“The idea that we can win that often, maybe we become our own worst enemy,” Harter said. “We do make it look commonplace, but believe me, each and every one of them was a battle.

“If you can win the SEC, you’re definitely in contention to win nationals.”

But can Arkansas keep up this level of dominance? Some say no because of a trend in track & field and cross country to earmark scholarship money for specialists in one sport, instead of all three.

Track and cross country are equivalency sports, meaning they don’t offer full athletic scholarships to their athletes like football and basketball do. Women’s track programs have 18 scholarships to allocate across the three sports, while men’s programs have 12.6.

As Arkansas continues to attempt to be elite in all three sports, some universities have made the decision that they will attempt to be competitive in only one or two, and can offer more scholarship money to a recruit as a result. A top cross country athlete may have to make the decision between paying less out of pocket for tuition at a place like Providence, or taking less scholarship money to run at a more prestigious program like Arkansas or Oregon.

“Athletic directors have kind of gone into niche marketing — let’s exploit cross country, so we’re going to put all of our eggs into that one basket. We’re going to try to go after that one trophy,” Harter said.

That makes Arkansas’ recent run all the more impressive.

“In this day of specialization, to have this many athletes competing in this many events at this level is extraordinary,” said Bucknam, whose teams finished second at the NCAA indoor and outdoor meets this year. “I think that gets lost in the whole picture. As a coach, you have to make it all work.

“If I’m the owner of a restaurant and I need to bus a table, then I’m busing the table. Same thing here. If my coach needs a cup of coffee at practice, I’m going to get him a cup of coffee. I’m going to get him a glazed donut. I’m going to get him anything he wants. There’s no hierarchy or top-down coaching. I think that’s what makes it special here.”

As other programs change their approach, Arkansas will stick with the one that brought it. While things change around them, the Razorbacks keep winning.

“There are very few programs in the United States anymore that have separate programs — men’s staffs and women’s staffs,” Harter said. “A lot of athletic directors and administrators got lazy and thought, ‘We’ll just heap them together.’ Why don’t you do that with baseball and softball then? Basketball and basketball? It’s the same game.

“The idea of being able to specialize on a women’s program or a men’s program, and to be able to give those kids more individual attention and focus really kind of gives us an advantage.”