John Homon knew he had to find an edge on the competition during his time coaching cross country and track and field at Mount Union College in Ohio.
Homon — who grew up in Athol and was part of the 1962 Athol High School football squad that went undefeated and won a Central Mass. Class B championship — continued those winning ways off the gridiron.
He attended UMass after graduating from Athol, but eventually left to join the Army where he served as a medic during the Vietnam War. He returned and finished his undergraduate degree at UMass before earning a master’s degree in physical education at the University of Nebraska.
He later accepted a job at Mount Union in 1978, where he coached cross country and track and field for 33 years. During that time he racked up 54 of a possible 93 titles in cross country, indoor track and outdoor track, winning 21 indoor track titles, 19 outdoor track championships and 14 cross country titles in the Ohio Athletic Conference. Homon also coached his athletes to 503 individual OAC Championships.
His teams weren’t just successful in their league. Mount Union athletes secured an astounding 42 national championships and earned 204 All-American honors under Homon’s watch, with two athletes winning individual NCAA Div. III titles. He was named OAC Coach of the Year eight times in cross country, 10 times in indoor track and 12 times in outdoor track while being named NCAA Div. III National Coach of the Year in 1997 and 1998 in indoor track and in 2006 in outdoor track.
For all his accomplishments, Homon was one of six coaches selected to be inducted into the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association’s 2023 Hall of Fame class. It’ll be the third HOF induction for Homon, who has already been inducted into Mount Union’s Hall as well as the U.S. Track and Field Div. 3 Coaches Hall of Fame.
“This is a really great honor for me,” Homon said. “I never dreamed of anything like this. It’s really a cornerstone in my career. I was elected into other Hall of Fames but this is really the final note. It’s a great organization with a lot of great coaches and athletes in there. To be among them is quite an honor. I was at Mount Union for 33 years, had a lot of great athletes and won a lot of national championships. It was a good ride for me.”
Being a Div. III coach in Ohio is no easy task. Ohio State is the crown jewel that most athletes in the state hope to attend, but the Buckeye State is home to 13 Div. I programs which pluck talent in the area.
With top athletes choosing to attend Div. I programs, and Div. III programs not allowed to offer scholarships, Homon had to find a way to get the most out of the athletes he had coming into his program.
With the advancements in sports science and training, every workout college athletes participate in are preplanned to maximize their athletic potential. Back in 1978, that wasn’t always the case.
While at Nebraska, Homon watched the Huskers’ volleyball team scrimmage a club from Japan. He noticed how well the Japanese players were jumping, found the coach after the match and was introduced to plyometric training — a type of exercise training that uses speed and force of different movements to build muscle power.
He incorporated that training at Mount Union, and the success speaks for itself.
“I was ahead of my time,” Homon said. “I think I was one of the first track coaches to use that type of program to make the kids faster and more explosive. We had a kid who came in and was 5-foot-7 and had never been to a state meet. When we got done with his power workouts he could dunk a basketball. He even told me years after he left that he had still retained that explosiveness. We had a different program than what most colleges did and that helped out quite a bit.”
Two of the most notable athletes developed under Homon’s tenure were Dave Cooper and Shawn Watson.
Cooper won the 5,000 and 10,000-meter titles in consecutive years at the Div. 3 Outdoor Championship while Watson five NCAA titles, including four in a row in the outdoor long jump between 1996 and 1999 which is the longest streak of any athlete in NCAA history.
“Our kids came into the program and we did a lot of pretty intense training,” Homon said. “These kids got pretty good. We took a lot of pride in our development. If a kid came to Mount and worked under our programs — not just me as a coach but my other assistants, too — we really did develop these kids into some good athletes. We were able to win quite a few conference championships and obviously you’re only able to do that with kids who want to do it, want to work hard and want to improve.”
Having a coach like Homon certainly helped speed up the development process, but the longtime coach said it’s up to the athletes themselves as to how seriously they want to take their training.
He said he was lucky to have so many athletes come in wanting to work and listen to him to get better at their craft.
“You can develop that in an athlete but a lot of our kids came into the program wanting to work and get better,” Homon said. “They weren’t intimated at the national meets. That has something to do with the program that gave them confidence they could compete at the high level. The kids were able to do that.
“The kid has to be motivated,” he continued. “One of the things a coach has to be able to do is motivate the kids. You have to explain it to them when they have some work to do. It’ll be uncomfortable sometimes but if you explain to them that we’re trying to work to get you better, they usually understand. It worked pretty well. We had a lot of good kids and to this day a lot of kids still call me to talk.”
Homon starred in the shot put and discus while competing at Athol, where he won a state title in the discus. He went on to compete in both at UMass and was a discus champion in the Army.
At Mount Union his throwing teams were always talented — one year having the first, second, third and fourth place finishers at a state meet — but Homon focused on building an all-around track team that could compete at the big competitions.
“We had OK facilities but what I had was a training program where we’d get the kids more explosive and powerful,” Homon said. “We also had kids who were good distance runners. Overall we had a pretty good team. A lot of college coaches look at what they were good at and try to develop that. At Mount Union we had teams that would go to conference championships and be able to score at every event.”
Teaching wasn’t just on the track for Homon. He got his start in teaching at Greenfield Junior High School, where he was mentored by Stan Benjamin. He taught in Nebraska for a few years before getting the Mount Union job, and at Mount Union, he taught in the phys-ed department where he specialized in teaching first aid and CPR, making sure all his students that graduated in phys-ed and health would be able to earn all First Aid and CPR certificates upon graduation.
He wasn’t in Greenfield for long, but his time there certainly had an impact on his career.
“I love Greenfield,” Homon said. “I was a student-teacher and the kids were so respectful. I would go to Greenfield pretty often and always loved the city. It was a great community and I enjoyed my time there.”
A star on the football field and the track, it’s no surprise that Homon was a powerful person, nicknamed “Big John” at Athol. He used that strength to win two North American Arm Wrestling championships and multiple state titles in the sport.
“I did quite a bit of arm wrestling,” Homon said. “One of the guys I beat went on to win the world championship. I was watching it on TV and realized that was one of the guys I had beat. I did a lot of heavy training to get ready for those tournaments that a lot of other guys weren’t doing at the time that helped me.”
Homon retired from Mount Union in 2011 and currently resides in Friendship, Maine. He’ll travel to Denver in December for the Hall of Fame ceremony, receiving another well-deserved honors for his lengthy career.