Beloved Hoosiers Coach Maintained Commitment To Athletes Through Hardship, Looking For One More Big Finish Ahead Of Retirement

By David Woods for DyeStat

Photos courtesy Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – You could talk tough. Or you could live that way.

Ron Helmer has done both. For more than 50 years, he has coached so runners could live their dreams, if not exceed them.

Beneath a crusty exterior, he is as big a softie as your grandpa.

Take it from the 3,000-meter winners, Jake Gephardt and Jenna Barker, at Saturday’s Indiana Relays. Asked about the Indiana University coach, their responses were identical:

“He never gave up on me.”

Helmer, 75, is making this indoor/outdoor campaign his 16th and last at Indiana. Before that, he coached at Georgetown for 20 years, the final five as head coach. And before that, he coached at high schools in Kansas and Virginia.

His motivation was the same then as it is now. In describing career highlights, he is as likely to reference overachieving walk-ons as he is to national champions.

“It’s easy to coach the ones where everything is going well and all you have to do is just line them up,” he said. “But to continue to challenge people and stick with them and support them and tell them what they don’t want to hear sometimes and then get the results, that’s the part that still keeps me going.”

In recent years, Helmer has kept going despite life-threating health issues and personal tragedy.

In 2013, he endured kidney failure, dialysis, chemotherapy, stem cell transplant, and, finally, depression. His former runners called and texted from around the country. They traveled from California and Georgia to sit in his hospital room.

Improbably, the Hoosiers subsequently won their first Big Ten men’s cross country title in 33 years, ending Wisconsin’s 14-year reign. In a race of eight kilometers, at no point in the first seven did it appear Indiana could win. Then the Hoosiers advanced as if fueled by an unseen force.

“If it was a movie, you’d think it was too corny to be true,” said Fred Glass, who was then Indiana’s athletic director.

There would be even more for Helmer to endure. In 2014, his wife of almost 39 years, Mary, died from a rare blood disorder just weeks after becoming ill. She was 57.

In December 2015, Helmer was able to end dialysis when he received a kidney transplant. The organ donor was his daughter, Tori Arthur.

Through it all, athletes have said, Helmer’s devotion to them did not diminish. There are different ways in which love is manifested, and this was the coach’s way.

Barker arrived at IU in 2018 as a walk-on from Richmond, Ind., where she was a 2:13/5:02 high school runner. She won Saturday’s 3,000 in 9:21.46, ranking third in the Big Ten in 2023.

“The first year I ran here, I could definitely tell he wasn’t sure what he got,” she said of the coach.

When her confidence wavered, Helmer’s did not. He assured her he would never ask her to do something she simply could not do.

“It really resonated with me,” Barker said. “If he thinks I can do it – and he’s coached some of the greatest runners – why can’t I do this?”

Another fifth-year runner is Gephardt, a 4:11 high school miler from Sterling, Ill. He has never finished higher than sixth at a Big Ten championship.

Now, in successive January meets, he has run a 3:59.18 mile (nearly a 5-second PR) and took the Big Ten lead with a 3,000 time of 7:52.97. In the 3,000, he ran the last 800 in 2:00.62 and won by seven seconds over Butler’s Barry Keane, a Great Lakes Regional cross country champion. Gephardt said coach and athlete never abandoned each other.

“I know he’s had a lot of success in his career. So I believed in myself that if I kept working hard and doing what he says, it’ll click at some point,” Gephardt said. “It feels pretty good to have it clicking like this.”

Another Helmer protégé is Andy Bayer, a 2012 NCAA champion at 1,500 and 8:12 steeplechaser. Bayer, who turns 33 Friday, retired in April 2021 but recently resumed training. In his first race in nearly three years, he was second in the mile in 4:03.55 at the Indiana Relays.

Bayer said he owes his career to progress made under Helmer. The runner said he is incorporating what he learned from Helmer and from Jerry Schumacher at the Bowerman Track Club.

“He kind of tells you how it is,” Bayer said of the Indiana coach. “But that just means when he tells you he’s confident in you, you know he really means it. I think it’s that consistency. He also knows how to push an athlete, find those limits.”

Helmer learned how to work in Lyons, Kan., where he was raised on a wheat farm. He graduated from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan., before becoming a high school coach. In Virginia, he won 10 state championships and sent 13 runners to the Foot Locker cross country nationals.

At Georgetown, he had seven NCAA top-four trophies and four national event champions, two in the indoor distance medley relay. At Indiana, he has coached five teams to Big Ten championships in track or cross country and, as impressively, 11 more that finished second.

His Hoosiers teams include Canadian high jumper Derek Drouin, a five-time NCAA champion and Bowerman Award winner who was gold medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics; three World Championships qualifiers in Bayer (steeplechase in 2019), Molly Ludlow (800 in 2015) and De’Sean Turner (steeple in 2013); Ben Veatch, who had five firsts and 10 seconds in 17 Big Ten championship races.

Just as rewarding were ascensions of Zach Mayhew, a 4:30 high school miler who won the 2012 Big Ten cross country title over Moh Ahmed and Bayer, and stepson Teddy Browning, who was part of a 1-2-3 Indiana sweep of the mile at the 2018 Big Ten indoor meet.

Helmer’s influence extends to coaching colleagues. Some his former athletes and assistant coaches – including former Georgetown runner Mike Smith, who has led Northern Arizona to six of the past seven NCAA cross country titles -- traveled to Bloomington last September for a Coaching Tree Invitational meet.

“He was a big influence on me finding my way into college coaching,” Smith said, “and he’s been someone that I’ve used as a big resource along the way.”

Helmer has conceded there are elements he will not miss about college coaching, such as the transfer portal and name/image/likeness rule. He suggested all of it has created an unstable environment for athletes, all of them needing time to develop.

“I almost want to order a T-shirt that says, ‘Excellence follows not from what you get, but what you give.’ And we’ve forgotten that,” he said.

Indiana has promoted sprint coach Ed Beathea to be Helmer’s successor as head of men’s and women’s track and field. The next cross country and distance coach has not been announced.

If there is a star-in-the-making here, he is Camden Marshall, a 19-year-old sophomore who won the Big Ten indoor 800 last year and ran a 3:59.30 mile behind Gephardt.

IU athletes said Helmer never refers to this being his final season, but Marshall said they want to send him out properly. The Hoosiers are already doing so.

“I’m having a lot of fun because I have a lot of kids who are working hard, competing hard and staying true to the mission we have – which is to put together as good a team as we possibly can and go to Big Ten and have a good time keeping track of the points and seeing what we can do,” he said.

Contact David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidWoods007.