John Van Slyke: Bob Timmons, Legendary Coach and Role Model

Coach Bob Timmons

Excerpted with the author’s permission from “The NCAA: Who Protects Student-Athletes? A Proposal for a Student-Athletes Bill of Rights. About Bob Timmons by John Van Slyke, Jr.”

Bob Timmons was my swimming coach for an eleven-year period that began when I was about seven years old and continued through my Wichita High School East career. Each of these years consisted of an outdoor season in the summer and an indoor season during the winter.

At East, Bob also provided all of his swimmers with the “opportunity” to run cross country in the fall and track in the spring. Now I am no runner.  For me, the only thing more wretched than running cross country was the quarter mile in track.

 During the summer outdoor season, Bob was the coach of the Wichita Swim Club. All of the swimmers at East High were members of WSC. Consequently, those of us who were swimmers at East High School were under Bob’s constant influence 12 months of every year during the most critical formative years of our lives.

By any measure, this is a tremendous amount of time for an athlete to be with a single coach. Furthermore, competitive swimming was a family activity in our household. From an early age, my brother Tom and my sister Suzie also spent a similar number of years and similar amounts of time as Bob’s athletes. Such was the case in a large number of households in our community.

Like hundreds of other athletes during the 1950’s and 1960’s when Bob coached swimming, football, cross country, and track in Wichita, Kansas, we were proud to be known as “Timmie’s Kids.” I remain one of Timmie’s kids, and over the years, Bob has remained my mentor.

Bob’s years in Wichita were magical. An unusually large number of exceptional, high-achieving people grew up and came of age in our town. It was a joyous time and a setting that was straight out of American Graffiti. Timmons was the centrally important catalyst to happy, raucous family life, the collective joy, and countless individual and team achievements in Wichita during that era.

Looking back, I can see that Bob and my father, the late John R. Van Slyke, Sr., set the personal examples that I try to keep in mind as I lead my own life. The core values that Bob and my father gave to me have served as my compass and anchor to  windward during challenging times.

Each of us (Let’s define who us is – those he coached I presume)owes a personal debt to Bob. Bob was centrally important in the development of our characters and core values. He was our teacher, and he remains one of the most remarkably influential people any of us have ever known.

Bob is a wellspring of boundless positive energy and optimism. He motivates people through gentle, positive reinforcement. He has a gift when it comes to helping athletes excel both in sports and as human beings. At the same time, Bob is incredibly demanding. To train under Bob Timmons is to learn what concepts such as positive mental attitude, goal orientation, hard work, personal best, and relentless pursuit of excellence truly mean.

To this day, each time I complete a task or meet some challenges in my life, I find myself asking the question Bob taught me to ask, “Do you think this is the best you can do?” Invariably, the answer will be “Not yet.” This question often comes up in our lives because Bob taught us how to set our own standards. He helped us see beyond our past accomplishments, envision the future at a higher level, and understand that it is rarely possible for people with very high goals and high personal standards to say with certainty exactly when we have done the best we can do. Today, maybe, but what about tomorrow?

The way he did all this was subtle and deceptively simple. Bob Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled,   “It was amazing to me how Timmons was able to influence his athletes. He never raised his voice. He never used coarse language. He got results by tapping into and developing each person’s sense of self-worth and by getting them to establish and achieve higher and higher goals.” 

Bob Timmons led by example. He worked hard at his job, and he put in long hours. He kept extensive, meticulous records. He knew exactly when each of his athletes had achieved a personal best, including in the classroom. Attitude was everything. Bob accorded the highest amount of personal respect and praised those who worked hard and achieved personal bests in training and competition. Likewise, he communicated (always in a private setting) his gentle but clear disappointment to those who violated team rules or dogged it in the classroom, in training, or competition. Failing to finish was taboo. Barring serious injury, all Bob’s athletes were expected to finish each and everything they started in training and competition. Any thought of failing to finish was absolutely out of the question.

Bob helped us understand that we had a higher-level duty to our teams, our families, our school, and those who supported us and provided us with the use of the facilities and resources we used. He also helped us understand the duty we had to ourselves to do the very best we could with whatever skills and opportunities we had.

In short, Bob Timmons is a person who could find a way to coach the Boston telephone book in the pool, on the track, or in any other sporting venue if called upon to do so. 

Bob’s professional accomplishments provide the evidence that he is one of the gold standards against which other coaches, teachers, and mentors can be compared. Bob’s record in the coaching profession—in the NCAA, in high school athletics, and age group programs—is truly distinguished. During his coaching career, Bob coached several sports, including basketball, cross country, football, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, and volleyball. His career is remarkable for a large number of truly exceptional athletes and high achieving individuals who can trace the roots of their core values and characters to Bob’s many teams and programs.  

■ NCAA Coaching Record 

Bob Timmons is probably best known in the coaching profession as the head coach of the University of Kansas from 1965 to 1988.

Hired as an assistant coach in 1964, he subsequently replaced the legendary Bill Easton as head track coach at KU in 1965. Twenty-three years later, Bob retired from collegiate coaching.

He helped produce athletes who compiled an outstanding record in track and field. Here is a list of his athletes’ exceptional achievements in the NCAA: 

• 1966—NCAA Indoor Championship.
• 1969—NCAA Indoor Championship.
• 1970—NCAA Indoor Championship.
• 1970— NCAA Outdoor Co-Championship.
• Twenty-nine Big 8 Conference Titles in cross country, indoor track and field, and outdoor track and field.
• Ninety-seven individual and 16 Relay All-American rankings.
• Sixteen indoor and outdoor world records.

Several of Bob’s athletes who went on from KU to became national AAU champions represented the United States in the Olympic games and competed in the world championships and/or other international meets. Some also played professional football in the NFL.

One of these student-athletes is Jim Ryun, arguably the most outstanding miler and middle-distance runner ever from the United States. Through Bob’s mentoring, Jim Ryun also came to epitomize the ideal student-athlete. He was self-effacing and humble about his considerable accomplishments. Ryun was a three Olympic team member and was the silver medalist in the 1500 meters at the Mexico City Olympic Games. While at KU, Ryun broke NCAA, the U.S., and world records in the half mile, 1,500-meter, and mile runs and was a member of three relay teams that held U.S. and world relay records. While a member of Bob’s track team at Wichita High School East, Ryun was the first high school miler to break four minutes. His 1500 meter and mile records, established at East High in 1964 and 1965, were broken in 2001. Jim Ryun later served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.             

■ High School Coaching 

Before coaching at KU, Bob made a name for himself nationally as an outstanding coach of swimming and track and field at Wichita High School East. During the late 1950’s to the mid-1960’s, Bob’s teams at Wichita High School East dominated their sports at the state and regional levels. In each of these sports, Bob produced several high school Al-l Americans and several who became legends.

One of Bob’s early swimmers at Wichita High School East was Jeff Farrell. Jeff tied the national high school record in the 220-yard freestyle, later became an NCAA All American at the  University of  Oklahoma,  and then became a world record holder and Olympic champion.

Another example from Wichita High School East is Robert Gates, who worked with Timmons as a student manager for East High sports teams. Bob Gates rose through the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nominated by President Bush, he became Director of Central Intelligence. Bob advised five presidents during his distinguished career with the CIA, National Security Council, and the Department of Defense, where he served as Secretary of Defense for President Bush and President Obama.      

■ Age-Group Coaching 

In the early 1950’s, Bob founded the Wichita Swim Club. He did this by engaging his athletes’ parents, including my father and mother, to build and sustain the club. The WSC grew rapidly, and Bob’s athletes in the WSC dominated age-group competition in the region.

Today in 2020, more than forty years after Bob started the organization, the WSC is still going strong. In the WSC, Bob coached dozens of young boys and girls who became successful collegiate swimmers and All Americans or contributed in an important way to the sport of swimming as coaches following their competitive careers.

■ Other Activities

Bob lived in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife, Pat. After retiring from college coaching in 1988, Bob continued to be very active and very involved in athletics.  He coached  junior high school girls track. Bob also devoted a great of deal of time to church and community affairs. During two missions to the Republic of South Africa, he coached young black athletes and advised members of the black community about how to create amateur track and field programs for kids and young people.

In retirement, Bob became an excellent sculptor. His sculptures of Al Oerter and Jim Ryun and permanent exhibits in KU’s Phog Allen Field House. 

Finally, it is most fitting that a portrait Coach Bob Timmons hangs in the KU Athletic next to Gail Sayers, Chamberlain, Billy Mills, and the other immortals of athletics at the University of Kansas.