“We mourn the loss of our beloved Coach Jacket. She was an icon in the Track and Field community with a legacy of producing student-athletes who performed at the top of their game. Her groundbreaking achievements and stellar record as a coach will continue to serve as an inspiration to all. The Prairie View A&M University family offers our deepest sympathy to coach Jacket’s family and friends.”

-Donald R. Reed, Ph.D., director of PVAMU Athletics.

One of the greatest women’s track and field coaches in not only U.S. track and field history but also Prairie View A&M University history has passed away. Barbara Jean Jacket was 87 years old.

“Nobody remembers second place,” Jacket often told her Lady Panthers during her 25 years of coaching the women’s track and field team from 1966 to 1991.

With that admonition and hours of hard two-a-day workouts, her teams brought home 18 national championships and 23 Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) championships. The SWAC championships included nine for indoor, six for outdoor and eight for cross country. Jacket was named SWAC Coach of the Year on 23 occasions and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Coach of the Year five times.

“Barbara Jacket has been a consistent staple in the track and field community,” said PVAMU Head Women’s Track and Field Coach Angela Williams. “She helped promote the sport for women at a time when women were considered second class. Given the opportunity to help continue the legacy she has built has been an honor. She will be missed.”

Barbara Jacket During her years of coaching the Lady Panthers, Jacket turned out 57 All-American athletes and five Olympic contenders. Her success with her PVAMU teams brought Coach Jacket national attention, and she was recruited to coach USA teams at international meets beginning in 1975. From 1975 until 1991, her international coaching took her to Russia, Europe, Japan, South America and New Zealand.

Jacket retired from coaching the Lady Panthers at age 56 to concentrate on her job as head coach of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Women’s Track and Field Team. She was the second African American to hold the job, the first having been Dr. Nell Jackson 36 years earlier, in 1956. Dr. Jackson had been one of Jacket’s most important mentors. At the same time Nell Jackson served as Olympic coach, she was Jacket’s track coach at Tuskegee University, her alma mater.

With a three-billion television viewers worldwide watching the 1992 Olympics and 250 million Americans expecting their countrywomen to bring home gold from Barcelona that year, Jacket felt the pressure to make sure that the athletes in her charge put in their top performances. When it was over, the U.S. women track stars took home four gold, three silver and three bronze medals, more than any U.S. Women’s Olympic Track and Field team had won since 1956. Her gold medalists in Barcelona included legendary sprinters Gwen Torrence, Evelyn Ashford and Gail Devers, and heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Jacket grew up on the West Side of Port Arthur, Texas, with a single mother and two siblings. “When I was a kid, I didn’t know we were poor because we always had something to eat,” she said. “It was in Port Arthur that I received my most important mentoring and where I began setting the stage for my career.”

Jacket attributes much of her success to her Lincoln High School basketball and track coach, Miss AP Guidry, her first and most important mentor. With Miss Guidry’s help, Jacket attended Tuskegee University after graduating from Lincoln in 1954. At Tuskegee, Jacket earned the nickname “Miss Basketball” for her prowess on the court.

Barbara Jacket After graduating from Tuskegee in 1958, Jacket taught one year in Eufala, Alabama, and then moved back home to Port Arthur to teach at her alma mater, Lincoln High School, and to take care of her ailing mother, who would die shortly thereafter. In 1964, she took the job of swimming instructor at PVAMU. Because competition was in her blood, in 1966, Jacket decided to start a women’s track team at Prairie View A&M by recruiting female students from her physical education classes and girls she saw running across campus who were trying not to be late for class.

“As a student-athlete, I was lucky to have known Coach Jacket; although I was not a member of the Prairie View A&M track team, as an athlete, she still played an intricate role in my life,” said Alicia Pete, associate athletic director at PVAMU. “She always readied with a kind, encouraging or motivating word. Coach Jacket had high expectations for each student-athlete that she encountered. She inspired me to preserver during difficult times and showed me by example how to live life as a productive, responsible and caring adult. I have so much admiration and respect for her.”

The most gratifying event of Jacket’s career—her greatest accomplishment—came in 1974, she said, when her team won its first national championship at the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women meet, with only five athletes on the team. “That win was a stepping stone to the rest of my career,” Jacket said.

A few of Jacket’s other honors include: being named to the SWAC Hall of Fame and NAIA Hall of Fame; being named “Distinguished Citizen” by the Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce; being named to Tuskegee Institute’s Athletic Hall of Fame; receiving the award for NAIA “Outdoor Track Coach” four times; “Coach of the Year” by SWAC in cross country seven times, indoor track nine times and outdoor track six times; being voted a proclamation for meritorious service by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents; receiving the Joe Robercher Award, President’s TAC Award and twice receiving the Yellow Rose of Texas Award; and she was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame.