Bob Hayes Invitational Track Meet moving from Raines High School to UNF: 'A new chapter'

Jacksonville's most storied track and field tradition is on the run toward a new destination.

After more than a half-century as an annual celebration at Raines High School, the Bob Hayes Invitational Track Meet will move next spring to the University of North Florida, officials from both institutions announced Wednesday.

The first edition on the Visit Jacksonville Track at Hodges Stadium is scheduled for March 18, 2023, nearly 15 miles southeast of its longtime home, where the race developed into a landmark on the city's annual sports calendar.

"It was an emotional decision, because I ran on that track and walked the halls of Raines High School," meet executive director Greg Coleman said.

UNF's modern track represents a new destination and a new chapter for the annual meet held in honor of Hayes, the Jacksonville native who won the title of fastest man in the world in the 100-meter dash at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

A graduate of Matthew W. Gilbert High School, Hayes subsequently turned to the gridiron and won a Super Bowl with the NFL's Dallas Cowboys on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

"If you give a young person a vision of what's possible, you're building hopes and dreams," Coleman said. "That's what Bob was all about, and that's what we want to continue to do, continuing the legacy, grabbing the baton."

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A pattern of change

The move to UNF represents the latest of several major changes for the Bob Hayes meet, which has lost several of its most central figures of late.

Those include Nathaniel Washington, the former Douglas Anderson coach long known as the meet's originator, who died in 2019 at age 93; Jimmie Johnson, the former Stanton and Raines coach and later a principal and School Board member, who died in January at 88; and James Day, the iconic meet director for 53 years while also serving as a Raines coach and administrator.

Day, who guided the Bob Hayes meet's rise in stature to become one of the nation's chief high school track events, died at 89 in February.

The move to UNF didn't take place in a vacuum. UNF deputy athletic director Ervin Lewis said Day had been in discussions with the university for years about the possibility, even going back to the university's first NCAA regional meet at the updated stadium a decade ago.

"He had a vision, and his vision was to take the Bob Hayes to the next level," Lewis said.

Finally, after several months of weighing the options, Coleman decided this year that the time was right to move.

"There were a lot of factors that we looked at, both pre- and post-COVID," he said. "It was not an easy decision, but it was a decision that had to be made."

Coleman said the decision about the long-term venue could be revisited in the future.

The meet held its 57th edition on March 19 at Raines. There, the event — billed for decades as the nation's largest single-day high school track meet, though the number of participants has fluctuated over the years from its high of 2,700 — has grown into one of the primary athletic celebrations in Northwest Jacksonville, along with the annual Raines-Ribault Northwest Classic in football.

Long history at Raines

Although not the original host of the Bob Hayes Invitational, previously held at three other Northwest Jacksonville schools, Raines has held each edition of the meet since 1968. The exception was 2020, when the meet was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

While at Raines, the growth was rapid. The inaugural meet, held in honor of Hayes' Olympic triumph, included only five schools, all from Jacksonville: Matthew W. Gilbert, Douglas Anderson, New Stanton, Northwestern, and Stanton Vocational High School. Only Douglas Anderson and Stanton, both in different forms, remain active as high schools today.

In nearly six decades since, the competition has drawn thousands of the leading high school athletes from both inside and outside Florida, including future collegiate champions and Olympians. Last month, former Miami Northwestern sprinter Twanisha Terry, a runner-up at the 2017 Bob Hayes, won gold for the United States in the 4x100-meter relay at the World Athletics Championships in Oregon.

The biggest challenge facing the Bob Hayes at Raines, Coleman said, was space.

Parking is a perennial challenge, typically spilling out for multiple blocks into the nearby neighborhood, and Coleman said the confines within the campus itself posed a potential safety hazard for a meet of the Bob Hayes' size, even more so since the Florida High School Athletic Association's reintroduction of the javelin throw in 2019.

"We're landlocked [at Raines]," he said. "If you look at the field — I'll take the area where we have the shot, the discus and the javelin — it is so tight. It's scary to me. I went out and walked that place a couple of times. And if a heel happens to slip throwing the javelin and that javelin goes right, we could be having a whole different conversation."

Raines will continue to serve as a sponsor of the meet.

Whatever the venue, Coleman is confident that the event will continue to make an impact in Northwest Jacksonville.

Organizers plan to launch shuttles to transport spectators to Hodges Stadium from Raines, where fans traditionally gather in the early morning hours on meet day.

Other traditional events during the race week, including a scholarship golf tournament and the middle school competition held the Friday before the high school meet, are scheduled to continue as usual in 2023. Coleman said the middle school meet will also take place at UNF, possibly with college coaches on hand.

"I'm looking at this as an opportunity for our students at Raines and other students to get exposure... and the experience that they're going to get here at UNF," Raines principal Vincent Hall said.

Bob Hayes boosts UNF

The Bob Hayes Invitational becomes the latest major track event to touch down at UNF.

"This is a tremendous honor to see us really move forward in the world of track and field, and to have such a prestigious event like the Bob Hayes Invitational in our backyard," Lewis said.

The university installed a new running surface in the spring of 2021, assisted by $950,000 from the Duval County Tourist Development Council. That upgrade, added to a track already noted as one of the United States' premier running venues, gave Jacksonville a surface similar to the one used at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., host of the NCAA Championships as well as this summer's World Athletics Championships.

The NCAA has already designated UNF as its host for the East Preliminary, the last step before the national championships, in both 2023 and 2025.

Coleman said the move to the elite track at UNF will also help to attract top programs from outside the area. Although some Sunshine State superpowers like Miami Northwestern have continued to keep the Bob Hayes Invitational on their schedules to the present day, others have dropped off compared to the meet's prime years.

"[Priority] Number one is to bring those schools back who have chosen to go elsewhere to compete in the third weekend in March," Coleman said. "We have some of the world's best high school athletes in this area and for them not to be a part of the Bob Hayes, it's a travesty. So we're going to relaunch, rebranch, rebrand, remodel and market the Bob Hayes like never before."

Coleman said the meet has already received several inquiries from teams from outside Florida for 2023.

For next spring, a new location — but, Coleman hopes, the grand old tradition.

"You can't say enough about the possibilities," he said. "The guys in the NFL that have come through the Bob Hayes, they say, 'Man, if I can compete at the Bob Hayes and if I can win at the Bob Hayes, I can win anywhere."

Clayton Freeman covers high school sports and more for the Florida Times-Union. Follow him on Twitter at @CFreemanJAX.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: University of North Florida to host Bob Hayes Invitational Track Meet