'Ready to run': Francesca Green makes history as UTEP's new track and field coach

Francesca Green showed from a young age she had a unique talent for track and field; this isn't surprising. Future All-American athletes often get quick starts and show a spark as soon as they're up out of the cradle.

What Green, who was named the eighth track coach in UTEP history on July 15, may not have realized when she was in elementary school was she was also demonstrating she had the talents to lead a program, particularly in this new era of NIL money.

"Track was always my love, I started running when I was 8 years old," Green said on her first full day in El Paso. "My brother and I would hustle his friends for money. A lot of it started, 'Hey, I bet your friend's slow. Let's see if we can make $5.'"

"You tap into that ego, I made quite a bit of money that way. We'd hustle them so we could get penny candy at the supermart. I then realized I was pretty good at it," she said.

"I realized track was the sport that would get me a scholarship, first generation going to college. My dad had a 6th grade education, my mom was a stay-at-home mom. The only way I'd be sitting here right now is if I got a track scholarship. Here I am."

Francesca Green making history

Being good at running, and later jumping, opened the doors for Green that eventually would define her collegiate life, then her professional life. Hustling up money will be a big part of her next act at UTEP, where she is poised to make all kinds of firsts.

For a program that defined itself with Black athletes from all over the world through its storied history, Green is the first Black head coach of the program, and also the first to come from outside the UTEP family since Bob Kitchens began his Hall of Fame career at UTEP in 1989.

Green is UTEP's first Black woman head coach in any sport.

Green truly represents a new era for a track program more than 40 years removed from the last of its 20 national championships. She's also the first female to lead a men's program (she's both men's and women's coach, as well as he head cross country coach for both) in UTEP history and one of a small but growing number of those nationally.

Per research from Track & Field News and the USTFCCA (NCAA track coaches association), Green is believed to be one of 15 female track coaches overseeing one of the 287 men's Division I programs.

While she has never defined herself as a trailblazer (the head coach at Arizona where she spent the previous 20 years was a Black man, Fred Harvey), Green is excited about the history.

"The night before I came on my interview I watched Glory Road," Green said. "That's one of my favorite, favorite movies. Seeing what transpired back then and seeing how far its come, the times and how they've changed."

"I don't look at it from the perspective of being the first black female," she said. "I love coaching and I look at it as an opportunity to show other women you can do anything you want and be in any level you want if you're passionate and work hard. I don't look at it from that perspective, but it is exciting, it's really cool."

Green moves from athlete to coach at Washington State

This job also is the culmination of a long climb that in some ways began when she was 8 (she was born in 1977) in Kennewick, Wa. and took flight when she arrived at Washington State as a sprinter/jumper in 1995.

She was an all-around hand in the jumps and relays and was a two-time All-American in the long jump in 1996 (outdoors) and '97 (indoors).

Green also made a mark in other ways, when she helped her coach Rick Sloan run a summer track camp.

"When I started at Washington State I thought I would be a business major; I saw myself walking down Wall Street with a briefcase," said Green, who quickly disabused herself of that and changed majors to Kinesiology after her freshman year with the idea she'd be a physical therapist. But ...

"I would work the camp every summer," Green said. "After my sophomore year of working the camp, (Sloan) said, 'Have you ever thought about coaching?' I hadn't."

"Then I worked camp as a junior and he came to me, 'Have you thought about it?' 'Coach, talk to me more, why would I be a good coach?'"

He has a ready answer for that.

What makes Francesca Green so good?

"A number of things," said Sloan, who retired as WSU's coach in 2014 and is now a supervisor of officials in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. "She's smart, she's very open to learning and gathering as much information as she can, first as an athlete then as a coach with us."

"She is a very good teacher and developer of talent. I saw those things when she was an athlete on our team. We saw her competitiveness from the start. She had all the qualities we were looking for in someone to help lead our sprint group at Washington State."

"She's the highest quality — great character, great integrity, she knows how to treat people. She always as been 100% committed to any task she undertakes."

After getting her undergraduate degree, Green coached and continued to train and compete at her alma mater in Pullman for three years, when she received her masters, then followed her event coach to Purdue as she trained for the 2004 Olympic Trials. That proved to be the final act of her competitive career.

Rising in Arizona

From there she made a fateful move to the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she took a job in marketing with an eye toward administration. She didn't stay at that job for long, but she stayed at UA for 21 years.

That move to administration began in a significant way in 2005 when Fred Harvey asked her to create a new position on his track program. He hired her to move over from marketing to be the program's first-ever ops director, right as that position was being created at power conference programs across the nation (UTEP track hired its first ops director in 2020).

The ops director is often described as the person who turns the lights on in the morning. Ops directors arrange travel, direct home meets, move athletes into dorms, help put together the schedule and handle all the administrative paperwork that accumulates.

"I was born and raised to teach," Harvey said. "The administrative work is not my thing."

It became Green's.

"There weren't many (track ops directors) in the country, I was one of the first to be in that role," she said. "I learned a lot about all the behind-the-scenes stuff of what it takes to run a program. I had my hand in everything."

"You have to understand all the ins and outs of track and field. You have to know not only what goes into the Xs and Os of how to run fast and compete at a high level, but all aspects that go into it — academics, compliance, equipment, the budget — all that goes into the program. That prepared me to be even a better coach."

Along the way she served as an assistant coach for Team USA at the Pan American Games in 2009, and head manager for Team USA at the World Championships in Moscow 2013 and Beijinig in 2015

In 2009 she was indeed prepared and Harvey made her a sprints coach. In 2021 she was promoted to associate head coach, the top assistant.

"She was an elite athlete," said Harvey, who retired as head coach at Arizona in May — right around the time Mika Laaksonen retired at UTEP — and was named Arizona's Coach Emeritus. "All elite athletes are not elite coaches. But she has an ability to communicate, to translate her knowledge to the athletes. She has a lot of passion and she passes that on to her athletes."

"She has been groomed and she's ready to run her own program. I'm like a proud dad."

'She's helped me throughout life'

Green has also worked with a number of student-athletes who went on to feel like proud children.

"She's awesome," said Bryce Houston, a sprinter from Arizona who graduated in 2017. "They're getting a great coach, a great leader. She's helped me throughout life. She's the kind of coach and human being that you want to lead young people."

"She doesn't just coach track and field and strength and how to become a better athlete, but she helps you reach your potential as a human being."

He said the biggest things he learned from her came outside the track.

"She taught character, whether on the field or off," Houston said. "Coaches usually come and just want you to drop times and get the numbers out of you, but she was able bring the best out of you as a person."

"She could see some of the weaknesses that you could have on the track and off, and she would try to navigate you and teach you different things from her own life story that would help you open up your mind and just see things from a different viewpoint."

At the end of Houston's freshman year, on a small partial scholarship and when he had yet to reach the potential that would eventually see him run a leg on a school-record 4x400 relay, the finances weren't adding up for him and he explained this to Green.

She went to Harvey and told him he was worth the risk, to give him a little more money. They did and Houston earned his degree from Arizona and is now a digital producer for the Columbus Post-Dispatch.

"I'd do anything for her," Houston said.

Shapri Romero (now James) didn't have any kind of scholarship when she walked on at Arizona in 2011 as an unacclaimed sprinter. She found a coach who believed in her in Green and finished her college career in 2014 as an All-American.

"She's a great leader," James said. "I actually walked on, I came in with some broken family stuff, and she was a great mentor who cared about me off the track. She gave me a great opportunity. A great leader sees the potential in people and has the desire to develop them. She's so organized, she's just an elite choice."

"She's great at developing people. She's great at building rapport and relationship with her athletes, as well as her colleagues, whoever she works with. She's very inclusive."

Changes ahead for UTEP track recruiting

After 20 years with Arizona track, Green had assembled they type of resume that UTEP was looking for when it went out to hire its new coach.

Green is a break from the past, but she also wants to connect back to that tradition. While UTEP hasn't won a national championship since 1982, as recently as 2022 it produced two world champions (Nigeria's Tobi Amusan, who still holds the world record in the 100 hurdles, and Kenya's Emmanuel Korir in the 800), the only NCAA school besides Texas A&M to have two world champions.

"I want UTEP to be a top 10 team nationally, we're competing against all conferences," Green said. "We'll be competing against the SEC, the ACC, the Big 12, the Big 10. To do that there will be challenges but we're going to do our best to be a top conference team every year, which will prepare us to be a top 10 team every year."

She's going to go about that differently, however. On a program that built its rich history with foreign athletes, Green plans to focus her recruiting on Texas, which arguably has the best high school track in the world.

While Texas preps have had tremendous success in the NCAA, UTEP hasn't landed many. The Miners' last American man who won a national championship was El Paso High alum Jerome Deal, who won the 100 in 1979 (he was the only American to score at the NCAAs on that national championship team). Michigan prep Kim Turner won the NCAA 100 hurdles in 1984.

On this year's team, the only Texan (and American) to win part of one of UTEP's nine CUSA gold medals was Lancaster's Addison Stricklin, who ran a leg on the women's championship 4x100.

There are no shortage of great Texas track athletes, but UTEP's conventional wisdom across many sports is that it's hard to recruit Americans to UTEP because of negative perceptions of El Paso that foreign athletes don't have.

The Miners usually have a large group of El Paso walk-ons but their point scorers at conference and nationals have usually been foreign athletes.

That may have begun to change when Green made her first signing, former Coronado distance star Luis Pastor, who began his career at the University of Texas. His signing was announced the day after her hire was announced.

"Once I met Francesca Green, she was very open to questions," Pastor said. "She wasn't scared to answer hard questions."

"I asked her thoughts on cross country, distance and she had great answers for all of it. She seems very no nonsense. She seems like she's there to improve the program to help everyone reach the pinnacle of the sport."

It makes sense to her that much of "everyone" will be Texans as she shapes the roster.

"When you look out there and think, 'What states have deep numbers in all areas,' Texas is a track and field state," Green said. "There's a tremendous amount of talent right here in the state of Texas. My intention is to recruit heavily in the state and build a well-rounded program that's going to compete for championships, whether the conference level or national level."

She's not going to abandon recruiting foreigners, they had some at Arizona, but that's not the focus going forward. After Texas comes the Southwest, then the Midwest.

"We're going domestic," Green said. "There are a lot of athletes right here in this state. And America. Arizona, Nevada, the cold-weather Midwest states with athletes who want to come to a warm-weather place. That's my intention. We'll recruit hard to build a well-rounded program and we'll start right here in Texas."

"It's not that we don't want international athletes at all, we want to build a well-rounded program."

Home meets are coming back

Green also hopes to build a program El Pasoans want to watch. UTEP used to have two home regular-season meets a year, then one, then the UTEP Springtime went away after 2019. Budget was the reason given, but she made her vision of a new era known in the hiring process and here is a result.

Home meets "are 100% my intention," Green said. "I was a meet director for a number of years at Arizona. I've had my hands in home meets for 20 years. It is 1,000% my intention to bring home meets back here and take up a notch. There's going to be a home meet this year. Maybe two."

This is going to take money UTEP hasn't had and Green understands that's part of the job. In some respects, that's been part of track for her since she was 8.

"Money will be a challenge," she said. "That's where I'm going to call our alumni, our donors, all the supporters of track and field. My hope is they come out and support us and help in all ways possible."

"I want to get us to the highest level possible. I want us to be a top 10 team every year. It's enhancing and changing the culture of what it means to be elite and having athletes who match my vision and what I see this program being."

"Those are challenges, that's the exciting part of it. I look at a challenge as a positive. It creates opportunity."

This is Green's opportunity and she's ready to take full advantage, just like she always has.

Bret Bloomquist can be reached at [email protected]; @Bretbloomquist on X.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Francesca Green makes history at UTEP with hire; now she aims for more