Steve Lemke, who has coached eight track and field Olympians and guided throwers to 13 NCAA Division I individual national titles, has been named the 2015 recipient of the Ralph Ginn Award for Coaching Excellence.
The award is presented by his alma mater, South Dakota State University.
Lemke will be honored Oct. 10 during ceremonies at the McCrory Gardens Great Hall in conjunction with the 2015 Jackrabbit Sports Hall of Fame inductions.
A 1983 graduate of South Dakota State, Lemke currently serves as the associate head coach in charge of the throwing events at the University of Florida. Since joining the Gators in 2006, Lemke has mentored a group of throwers who have won 28 Southeastern Conference individual titles and have earned All-America honors 45 times.
Four different Gators Lemke has coached have won individual NCAA titles in the throwing events, including Mariam Kevkhisvili, who is one of two women in Division I history to win five titles in the shot put. Kevkhisvili won three consecutive indoor national titles from 2008-10 and claimed consecutive outdoor championships in 2009 and 2010. His latest star pupil was 2015 indoor national shot put champion Stipe Zunic.
In addition, Lemke has coached eight Olympians, including 2000 men’s pole vault gold medalist Nick Hysong, who Lemke previously coached at Arizona State.
Lemke began his collegiate coaching career as a graduate assistant at SoutheastMissouri State in 1985. He served coaching stints at Yale (1987-89), Texas-El Paso (1990-93) and Arizona State (1994-96) before coaching internationally in Norway (1996-98) and Australia (1998-99, 2001-04). He returned to the collegiate ranks as assistant women’s coach at Florida in 2006, and has coached both the men’s and women’s throwers since 2008. He was elevated to associate head coach in 2010.
Florida has claimed five NCAA Division I men’s team championships in his tenure, winning three straight indoor titles from 2010-12 and back-to-back outdoor championships in 2012 and 2013.
A native of Fargo, North Dakota, Lemke lettered for the Jackrabbit men’s track and field team from 1980-83 and was a member of SDSU teams that swept both the indoor and outdoor North Central Conference titles. Individually, Lemke won an individual NCC title in the javelin in 1983 with a throw of 226 feet, one-half inch and later earned NCAA Division II All-America honors with a fifth-place effort at the national meet.
The Ralph Ginn Award for Coaching Excellence was first awarded in 1972. Recipients of the award must be graduates of SDSU and have distinguished themselves in the fields of coaching and education. The award’s namesake coached football at South Dakota State from 1947-68, compiling a 113-89-9 record with nine North Central Conference titles in 22 seasons. Ginn’s wins mark stood as the most in program history until being passed by current Jackrabbit head coach John Stiegelmeier during the 2014 season.
