USC names Ron Allice’s replacement

For 15 years, Caryl Smith Gilbert has been molding champion track and field athletes and leaders east of the Mississippi. Beginning next season, however, she will move westward to Los Angeles where she will take the helm of the USC track and field program from Ron Allice, who held the position of director for the past 19 years.

Up-and-comer · Caryl Smith Gilbert’s Central Florida track and field team recorded a program-best fifth place finish at this year’s NCAA indoor and outdoor championships, capping off an impressive six-year run. – Photo courtesy of USC Sports Information

Smith Gilbert will have large shoes to fill, as Allice oversaw nearly two decades of success, including 25 combined men’s and women’s NCAA Top 10 finishes. His tenure also saw the women’s team win the 2001 outdoor NCAA title, its first in school history.

Though the Trojans are losing a leader responsible for nearly unparalleled success, USC athletic director Pat Haden is confident in his choice for Allice’s successor.

“[Smith Gilbert] has a superb history of success in her career,” Haden said in a press release. “She knows how to develop athletes, as evidenced by the steady improvement of her UCF program and the number of records her athletes set. She has recruited very well and knows the recruiting landscape in California. And her athletes have performed incredibly well academically.”

Haden’s words are bolstered by Smith Gilbert’s accolades. In her six-year tenure as head coach of the women’s track and field and cross country teams at the University of Central Florida, the Knights captured six Conference USA titles. Her teams featured four NCAA individual champions and more than 50 conference titlists. Furthermore, her Knights teams produced more than 100 All-Americans and broke more than 100 school records. Not surprisingly, Smith Gilbert was named the C-USA coach of the year in each of her six years with the program.

Smith Gilbert’s crowning achievement with the Knights was her program-best fifth place finishes at this year’s NCAA indoor and outdoor championships. After assistant coaching tenures at Tennessee, Alabama and Penn State, and her run of success at UCF, she will be moving one more step up the ladder as director of USC’s track and field program, arguably one of the most historically successful track programs in the country.

“This is a tremendous opportunity, a huge opportunity,” Smith Gilbert said in a press release. “While it is difficult to leave the program we built at UCF and I will forever be thankful for the support I received there, I am very excited about becoming a USC Trojan.”

While the USC men’s track and field program has been a perennial powerhouse with 26 NCAA outdoor titles, two NCAA indoor titles, 35 conference titles and 113 individual titles, the women’s program has not been quite as decorated.

With Smith Gilbert’s experience on the women’s side of things, the Women of Troy can expect a big lift in the years to come.