Less than 48 hours after he captured a bronze medal in the 800 meters at the Rio Olympics, Clayton Murphy pledged to continue to help raise the national profile of the University of Akron track and field program.
Until he graduates from UA in May with a degree in corporate finance, the 21-year-old professional runner is going to be asked to do the same for his university.
Athletic department leaders realize they couldn’t have found a better ambassador than Murphy, who three years ago finished seventh at the state high school meet in the Division III 800 meters for Tri-Village. Murphy said during an interview on the Today show that growing up in New Paris, Ohio, he’d been a member of the Future Farmers of America until his junior year. On Aug. 15, he became UA’s first Olympic medalist.
After the Zips’ football team played in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in December and earned its first postseason victory in the program’s 28 years in Division I, an analysis conducted by Joyce, Julius and Associates Inc. for the Mid-American Conference put a $13 million price tag on the media exposure UA gained. So the mention Murphy brought with his late finishing kick should be a gold mine.
“It’s the Olympics. That’s 100 bowl games at one time,” George Van Horne, UA’s associate athletics director for development and marketing, said Friday.
UA welcomed back Murphy on Wednesday with a news conference at InfoCision Stadium. Christine Curry, director of communications for the city, represented Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan and declared it Clayton Murphy Day.
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me to do appearances and it’s exciting to be able to share my experiences and share my story,” Murphy said. “The University of Akron did a lot for me, three years of collegiate running. It’s home for me now. I haven’t been home home since May. It feels like I live in Akron.”
As he did after the event, Murphy might be constantly posing for pictures and surely will lift campus morale.
“The biggest impact is everybody who’s an alum, the professors, the people who work here, the students, know they can achieve at a high level and go anywhere,” Van Horne said. “It doesn’t matter if that’s in athletics, in the law school, in engineering, in arts and sciences. … We’re a spectacular university and I think we showed it.”
A former UA baseball player who has worked at his alma mater since 1999, Van Horne touts other fellow alumni that have made a mark, including Deborah Cook, a judge on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, former NFL players Jason Taylor, Charlie Frye and Dwight Smith and several soccer players who have gone on to the pros. But Van Horne wants to showcase Murphy, even if it stretches UA’s limited marketing budget.
“That’s always been a part of our problem as a university, we don’t tell our story very well,” Van Horne said. “We’ve got 25,000 of those stories on campus and we’ve got 146,000 alumni worldwide. He’s one of the fastest men in the world, let’s use him to tell that story.”
Part of Murphy’s tale is the tutelage he will continue to receive from Lee LaBadie, the UA men’s distance and cross country coach who discovered Murphy in the tiny Southwest Ohio town near the Indiana border. While at Ohio State from 2006-08 and 1989-93, LaBadie trained Olympians Mark Croghan and Robert Gary.
UA track and field coach Dennis Mitchell saw three ex-Zips compete in Rio as pole vaulters Shawn Barber (Canada), who won the IAAF world championship in 2015, and Annika Roloff (Germany) joined Murphy. That should be a boon for recruiting.
“Lately we’ve been getting a lot of international interest because we have the reputation. We want to get that in the states as well,” Mitchell said. “We’ll still be a program that develops a lot of kids, have people like Clayton who were unknowns we were able to find that become great.”
Mitchell wants it known that UA “can run with the big dogs” and hopes to show track and field athletes they don’t have to be swallowed up at a Power 5 school to succeed on the world stage.
“Track and field at the NCAA is about the big five conferences or what they used to call the BCS, even more so than football,” Mitchell said. “The top 25 is basically all BCS schools. For us to be in the middle of that has been a very big deal.
“We feel like as a program we can go against anyone. We want recruits and people to see we can do that. You can come to Akron and be as great as you want to be.”
Murphy predicts UA will someday compete for national titles in track and field. The Zips have produced eight individual NCAA champions. But at the outdoor meet, the men have finished no higher than 12th in 2015 and the women no higher than 10th in 2014. In the indoor, the men tied for ninth in 2015, the women 18th in 2015.
“I think it’s huge to have three of us in the Olympics,” Murphy said during a conference call from Rio. “It shows what coach Mitchell and the event coaches have done at Akron over the last five years. The last two years we were competitive on the national level, at the national meet. It shows the growth and the commitment coach Mitchell has made to a championship team.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next couple years Akron isn’t showing up on ESPN as one of the top teams for national titles. It’s cool to say I was a part of that and hopefully I can be around Akron and help grow the team even more.”
When LaBadie was asked what Murphy’s bronze might do for UA and his program, he said, “You’re going back to school and you’re signing up for track and field, right? That should help.
“If they want good coaches, they want good facilities, a quality education, Akron’s the place.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read her blog at www.ohio.com/marla. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.