A Conversation with and Snapshot of the Cal Athletic Track and Field/Cross Country Director: Robyne Johnson
By Karah Giesecke
“What I know [about] Cal and the culture here is really just that of excellence. That people are extremely honored to have run here” says Robyne Johnson who was named Cal’s Track and Field/Cross Country Director last June, 2019. Johnson grew up in the Bay Area and even attended Berkeley High School for two years before graduating and going off to run for University of Texas at Austin. I spoke to Johnson about her role within Cal Athletics, the changes she is seeing in terms of representation that she herself is a part of, Cal’s position at the forefront of adapting to a new frontier for athletics and some of her own role models from when she was still in the early years of her career as a runner.
Johnson says she is honored to “be back and working towards getting Cal to some Pac-12 and national prominence” as she initially had begun her coaching career at Cal as an assistant coach, a position she held from 1995-2003. She returned to Cal after 14 years of serving as Boston University’s Track and Field/Cross Country director. Johnson recalled working under then Cal Track and Field/Cross Country Director Erv Hunt as an assistant coach and some of her earliest interactions with Cal Athletics. One of these interactions involved her very own high school coach who attended Cal, which highlights her lifelong connections to UC Berkeley. Johnson is also now uniquely connected to Cal’s legacy as she is the fourth coach to be named Track and Field/Cross Country Director for both the men and women’s running programs and the first woman to do so.
Johnson highlighted this shift in representation for women leading running programs, especially in the Pac-12, or the collegiate athletic conference that operates in the Western United States and involves 24 different sports at the NCAA Division I level, as she said that when she was first hired at Boston University she was just one of four women nationally acting as Track and Field/Cross Country Directors. Today there are three women in the Pac-12 alone, and two of color; that is, herself, Caryl Smith Gilbert at USC and Maurica Powell at the University of Washington. Johnson called this shift “empowering” and said, “I think it was long overdue and I think we’ve been capable of doing these types of jobs for a long time and a lot of us were assistant coaches for a lot of years, so yeah, we know we can do it and I think we’re proving we can do it now as well.” Johnson also spoke about Cal’s long legacy of talented coaches, including Bruce Hamilton, Dave Maggard, and Erv Hunt and how for Johnson being the first woman in her position “says a lot for the sport” and knowing that “Cal and the athletic department trusted me to do this job and looking at my background and knowing that I can handle it" is “an amazing feeling.”
Johnson also highlighted that in some ways what we are seeing now in athletics in terms of representation have rippled out from pieces of legislation like Title IX, a clause that was part of the Federal Education Amendments of 1972 that protects individuals from sex based discrimination in educational programs or those that receive Federal financial assistance. Johnson pointed out that part of the aftermath of this crucial civil rights law is that is has enabled women to have greater access to scholarships and therefore “opportunities that wouldn’t necessarily have been afforded to them had there not been Title IX.” This crucial law has also set a new precedent for women in spaces that had previously not been as accessible that then further provides “young ladies a chance to see women in positions of power or leading [that] encourage them to do so as well.”
Johnson reflected upon those women that she was inspired by while running at Berkeley High and remembers viewing Evelyn Ashford, the 1984 Olympic champion in the 100-meter dash, as one such person calling her a “shero” of hers. Johnson said that Ashford “was one that a lot of my teammates and I looked up to and thought she was amazing. She actually went to UCLA.” Some of her other sources of inspiration stemmed from events that occurred as the result of the boycotting of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow that the United States among other nations boycotted in order to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. As a result of the boycott Johnson remembers that “[t]here were a lot of Olympians who weren’t going to get to go to the games, so they came to these junior championships which was amazing.” Johnson was at those junior championships as she made the 1980 junior Pan American team and remembers that because the Olympics were being boycotted some of the United States’ best sprinters like Carl Lewis, among others, were able to come and compete on an international level through the Pan American games because they were unable to compete at the Olympics.
Some of Johnson’s early inspiration also came from her experience playing basketball as Johnson was on the varsity basketball as well as track teams at Mount Eden High School in Hayward, which she attended before transferring to Berkeley High. Despite her involvement in both teams she felt [her path] led to track because she was the fastest person at her school and this is an experience that she shared with other friends who became track athletes. They were “fastest person at their school” she said. “Not girl, not boy, fastest person at their school, like myself growing up.” With performance being praised outside of gender identification is also part of where Johnson says Track and Field/Cross Country is going: “people identify differently, and we just have to adapt and figure out how we move forward with that as well.” She also shared that “Berkeley has always been on the leading edge of doing things that weren’t - if you will, the norm around the world and the country” and that in many ways she sees that Cal is adapting and setting a precedent for what more inclusive athletic programs can look like. Johnson also shared with me her love for the national annual championship meet of the NCAA, or National Collegiate Athletic Association, the nonprofit that regulates over a thousand athletic institutions and conferences in North America. “I believe arguably the NCAA is one of the best track meets in the world. It’s the one place where you have the demographic of almost the same age and it’s both national and international kids just competing for their schools - just for their schools. There’s no money involved and that’s rare.” Johnson also called the meet “one of the purest forms of [Track and Field]” because its “a stomping ground unlike any other” in the ways that it brings athletes together to represent their schools.
Johnson has also seen the incredible dedication and excellence that she sees displayed at the NCAA in Cal’s student-athletes like long jumper Amy Littlepage, who Johnson previously coached at Cal and in whose success she played a role. Johnson said that Cal provides students with “the best of both worlds” in that students like Amy Littlepage, while earning degrees in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Mathematics, also had the resources and coaching to win three Pac-12 (it was Pac-10 at the time) championships and to receive All-American honors three times. Littlepage, Johnson shared, then went medical school and became a doctor, and that Littlepage is not alone among the students that Johnson sees as pursuing both athletic and academic excellence. Johnson, like the student athletes she coaches, is a vital part of Cal’s legacy of excellence and we are more than honored to have her.
