16 Facts About Jimmy Carnes

James Jerome Carnes was an American track and field athlete, coach and administrator.

Jimmy Carnes attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia from 1952 to 1956, where he played for the Mercer Bears basketball team and was a javelin thrower and high jumper for the Bears track and field team.

Jimmy Carnes dated his future wife, Nanette, a Mercer education major whom he knew from Eatonton, while they were undergraduates.

Jimmy Carnes graduated from Mercer in 1956, and accepted his first job as a physical education teacher and assistant coach for the football, basketball and track teams at Druid Hills High School in DeKalb County, Georgia.

In 1962, Jimmy Carnes became the head cross country and track and field coach at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

In 1965, Jimmy Carnes founded the Florida Track Club in Gainesville, an amateur track and field organization that helped to train high school athletes, college-level transfer students, future Olympians and other post-graduate competitors.

Jimmy Carnes recruited fifty-five graduate student-athletes for the Florida Track Club by offering several of them assistant coaching positions and helping many of them obtain graduate assistantships within the university to help them continue their graduate studies.

Jimmy Carnes served as the assistant coach of the US men's track and field team for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.

Jimmy Carnes was named the head coach of the US men's track and field team that was forced to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow as a result of the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

Jimmy Carnes resigned as the Gators track coach in September 1976 to focus on his Athletic Attic business interests and his Olympic coaching.

Jimmy Carnes became the chairman of the track division of the Amateur Athletic Union in 1977, and helped heal a decades-long institutional rift between the AAU and the NCAA.

Jimmy Carnes was involved in the formation of TACTRUST, the first step toward open track competition, and worked to guide the sport from amateur to open competition rules.

Jimmy Carnes served a total of twenty-one years as a member of the board of directors of the International Special Olympics.

Jimmy Carnes was inducted into the University of Florida Athletic Hall of Fame as an "honorary letter winner" in 1983.

Jimmy Carnes was married to Nanette Jimmy Carnes, and they were the parents of three sons and a daughter.

Jimmy Carnes died in Gainesville in 2011, after a three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer; he was 76 years old.