John Weaver - USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame 2021 Inductee

John Weaver was so interwoven into the fabric of Appalachian State University that school officials were ecstatic when they found a way to keep at least his name around long after retirement: They created the John Weaver Endowed Scholarship.

It made perfect sense. For 40 years, Weaver built a distinguished career on the Mountaineer coaching staff, including 36 as the only women’s head coach the school had ever known.
After three years in retirement, Weaver is being acknowledged again, this time with induction into the USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame as a member of the Class of 2021.

App State’s cross country and track & field programs flourished under Weaver’s tutelage, accumulating 78 conference team championships, with 75 coming in the Southern Conference before the Mountaineers moved to the Sun Belt Conference in 2014.

That wasn’t the only hardware that was amassed by the programs – in addition to hundreds of all-conference honors by his athletes, Weaver himself was honored a total of 43 times as conference Coach of the Year, all but one in the Southern Conference.

Coaching wasn’t Weaver’s initial profession of choice. After graduating from App State in 1971, he returned to his earlier alma mater of Seventy-First High School in Fayetteville, N.C., to teach biology. A stipend to work as an assistant coach on the high school’s track team helped encourage the newly-married Weaver to take his first involvement in the sport – “to see what it was all about,” according to the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer.

Soon, Weaver was putting his scientific mind to work, helping athletes train to get the maximum effort. When Seventy-First merged with Douglas Byrd High, Weaver was the principal’s first choice to lead the track & field program.

His first “recruiting” class came by standing near the football roster board and asking each skinny kid who got cut if they’d be interested in earning their first letter for the school. Some 60 boys showed up for track practice, and his coaching career took off.

Eager to improve, Weaver returned to App State to get his Master’s in biology and worked with the men’s cross country and track & field programs as a graduate assistant. He intended to return to Byrd but upon graduation was offered an alternative option of becoming head coach for the start-up women’s cross country and track & field programs.

Weaver stayed in Boone. That was in 1982 during transformational times for women’s sports, and Weaver helped the Southern Conference begin championships in cross country (1985), outdoor track (1987) and indoor track (1988).

App State became a dominant force in all three sports, winning the SoCon “Triple Crown” seven times.

In 1995, Weaver was named head coach of the Mountaineers’ combined men’s and women’s track & field teams, and the men added four SoCon triple crowns of their own.

Weaver coached many accomplished women, highlighted by hurdler Melissa Morrison, who won 12 SoCon individual titles and went on to earn a pair of Olympic bronze medals, and Mary Jayne Harrelson, the 1999 and 2001 NCAA 1500-meter champion. Harrelson and Morrison were two major pieces in App State earning 23 total All-America honors under his watch.

During the summer of 2012, Weaver served as the sprints and hurdles coach for the women’s USA National Under-23 team that competed in Mexico.

Weaver is married to Cynthia Harmon and has two sons, Chase and Jay, both graduates of App State.

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