Richard Clark – Cross Country & Track Coach: A 1960 Thayer High School graduate, Clark was a four-sport athlete at Missouri State before going into coaching. He spent a majority of his career at MSU, coaching from 1979 to 2000. He led the Bears cross country teams to the 1979 and 1980 Missouri Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships and guided MSU to five Mid-Continent Conference cross country titles in the eight years MSU was in the league. He was the conference Coach of the Year five times, and his tenure produced three individual conference champions in cross country and 28 all-conference performances in the three leagues in which he coached. Clark also started the Southwest Cross Country Coaches Association and ran it until 2020. It has held a season-opening meet annually since the mid-1980s and is called the Richard Clark Invitational. Hosted at several courses in the area, the event has grown from a dozen teams to now 2,400 athletes representing 80 high schools. As an athlete at MSU, he was a distance runner in cross country and track, and also played a season of football and two seasons of basketball. He then assisted Aldo Sebben as an unpaid graduate assistant. Clark then coached what’s now Cherokee Middle School for four years, Parkview High School from 1969 to 1976, and was a physical education teacher in elementary schools until taking on the MSU head coaching job. He has been a longtime bus driver and driver’s education teacher for Springfield Public Schools.
