Frost Reflects On Trailblazing Efforts

By Mike Babcock
(For Nebraska Sports Information)

Her athletic accomplishments seem unlikely, looking back across the years. They included four national senior AAU championships, a gold medal at the 1967 Pan American Games and competing in the Olympics at Mexico City in the summer of 1968, throwing the discus.

"I don’t want to call it a miracle," Carol Frost says now. "But it’s certainly unusual."

Her Olympic journey began on a farm near Cedar Rapids, Neb., where she grew up tossing a softball off the barn and imagining what it would be like competing in sports then limited to boys. At school, she would watch the boys’ basketball team practice and wish that she could play, too.

The Cedar Rapids High School girls’ softball and volleyball teams played just for fun, not for state championships. That opportunity would come much later, and then slowly, with Title IX.

Frost saw how slowly as coach of the University of Nebraska women’s track and field and cross country teams. The job was part-time when she accepted the salary of $2,500 in 1976. She worked from home, with virtually no budget. The maximum scholarship aid she could offer was $250.

Four years later, the Husker women won Big Eight indoor and outdoor championships for the first time, led by world-class sprinter Merlene Ottey, whom Frost had recruited, despite a last-minute push by Texas Women’s University, which included intrigue at the Hotel Meridienne in Montreal.

If not for Frost, Ottey almost certainly would have ended up at Texas Women’s University, dramatically changing the course of Husker women’s track and field history.

In some ways, Ottey’s competitive background was similar to Frost’s. Ottey began running barefoot on grass fields in rural Jamaica. By the time she reached college age, however, her world-class potential was apparent, leading to the recruiting battle involving Texas Women’s University.

Nebraska’s interest in Ottey was based on the recommendation of Clifton Forbes, a Jamaican who competed for the Cornhuskers in the late 1960s. Forbes also helped persuade Ottey, despite the fact that others tried to convince her to go elsewhere, primarily because of the weather.

Jamaican Donald Quarrie, who competed at Nebraska in 1970 before transferring to USC, was among the most prominent. Ottey was inspired by his success at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, a gold medal in the 200 meters and a silver medal in the 100 meters. His advice wasn’t easily ignored.

Even so, Ottey had committed to the Cornhuskers, following in a tradition of Jamaican track and field athletes that could be traced to two-time Olympian Keith Gardener in the late 1950s. And Frost wasn’t about to let Texas Women’s University Coach Burt Lyle change her mind.

In the late summer before her freshman year at Nebraska, Ottey traveled to Montreal to compete at the World Cup Trials. And Lyle went there to meet with her. Frost found out, flew Montreal and confronted Lyle, threatening action through the Association of Intercollegiate Athletes for Women.

The AIAW governed women’s intercollegiate athletics until the early 1980s, when the NCAA finally acknowledged and accepted its responsibility for sponsoring women’s championships.

Frost spent three days in Montreal, making sure no other school lured away Ottey. On the night before the finals, in the lobby of the Hotel Meridienne, Ottey asked Frost if Nebraska still wanted her. Frost’s presence was answer enough. They left Montreal together and flew to Nebraska.

When Ottey completed her eligibility, she had 27 Big Eight titles, 13 AIAW titles and three NCAA titles. In four seasons, she never lost a race, individual or relay, at the Bob Devaney Sports Center track, indoors, or at the Ed Weir Track, outdoors. She paced the Huskers to NCAA indoor championships in 1982 and 1984, under the direction of Frost’s successor as coach, Gary Pepin.

Ottey also represented Jamaica in the Olympic Games six times, beginning in 1980 at Moscow. Technically, she was the Husker women’s first representative in the Olympics. But Frost preceded her by a dozen years ? light years as measured in the growth and support of women’s athletics.

Frost was a student at Nebraska, a math and physical education major, when she was preparing for the Mexico City Olympics. But she had no track and field team with which to train, and little support. The university’s facilities were off-limits, to be used only by men, and some in the women’s physical education department, in particular the chairwoman, discouraged her Olympic aspirations. Athletic competition "just wasn’t acceptable for a woman," Frost says without a hint of bitterness.

There was one organized women’s team on campus, a club team for field hockey. It operated without the university’s support, playing a limited schedule, four or five games a year.

Frost played on the field hockey team. But the discus and shot put were her passion, since the boys’ basketball coach at Cedar Rapids High School, Randall Lambert, had organized a girls’ track and field team. Frost, then Carol Moseke, had never picked up a discus or shot before the summer of her junior year, when, through Lambert’s efforts, she competed in the Junior Olympics at Los Angeles.

In the vast expanse of the LA Coliseum, the farm girl from tiny Cedar Rapids placed second in the shot put and threw the discus far enough to win, had it not landed out of bounds. She also ran the hurdles and the half-mile at the Coliseum, both of which she gave up immediately after.

"I was OK for Cedar Rapids," she says. "But I got smoked."

Her initial success in the shot put and discus had continued to the point that she was willing to make the commitment required of an Olympic qualifier. Since she couldn’t use the university facilities, she improvised. The State Fairgrounds, pre-Devaney Sports Center, became her venue.

The concrete slabs on which combines and tractors are displayed during the fair became her throwing ring, and she ran sprints in the sheep barn when the weather was inclement. Sometimes she would use the throwing rings at Lincoln High or Southeast High, in the early evening, after the boys’ teams had finished practice. The rings at those high schools were accessible, because they weren’t fenced in.

She also trained at nearby Malcolm High, where she met her future husband. Larry Frost, who would go to Nebraska to play football and compete for a time in track and field, saw her practicing the javelin one day. A few years later, he would lay the cement for throwing rings for her.

For endurance, she ran the back steps at her dormitory, Pound Hall ? 13 floors, beginning in the basement. And she lifted a pair of 30-pound dumbbells in her dorm room.

Lambert continued to support her efforts, and after becoming the superintendent of schools at Garland, Neb., was close enough to help in her largely solitary training. He would shoot super-8 film of her throws, which she could then study and make adjustments in throwing technique.

Frost finished 14th among 26 competitors at the Mexico City Olympics, a remarkable accomplishment given the unpaved training roads she had to travel to get there. Eight years later, she returned to Nebraska, coming from Kansas City when Larry was hired as head football coach at Lincoln High.

Cornhusker Athletic Director Bob Devaney had coached Larry Frost and knew about his candidacy for the Lincoln High job, as well as the fact that he was going to be hired. So Devaney suggested to June Davis, an administrator in the new women’s athletic department, that she contact Carol about filling the job as track and field coach. With young sons Steve and Scott ? who would lead Tom Osborne’s final team to a national championship ? requiring attention, part-time employment appealed to her. Had she known the demands and time commitment, she might have reconsidered.

When the boys reached school age, the Frosts moved to O’Neill, Neb., where Larry became the head football coach and Carol became one of his assistants. She has continued to assist him in football, on and off, throughout his coaching career and is now listed as the head coach at Walthill, Neb., High. Larry, the superintendent of schools, is actually the head coach. But she has the title.

Even though women football coaches are few and far between, Carol Frost doesn’t see herself as a trailblazer, any more than she did when she was throwing the discus from the cement slabs at the Fairgrounds, preparing herself to compete with the world’s best at the Olympics.

"I never intended to say, ?Oh boy, I’m going to be the first one to do this,’ " she says. "As I look back on it now, I don’t understand how it all happened."