Linh Nguyen enters his fifth year as the head coach of the cross country and track and field programs at Toledo.
After taking over the reigns of the program in 2013, Nguyen led the Rockets to a second-place finish in the Mid-American Conference Women’s Cross Country Championships.
A year later, Nguyen led the Rocket women to its sixth Mid-American Conference championship in school history. The title was the Rockets fourth in five years, and helped Nguyen earn MAC Women’s Coach of the Year honors. Nguyen also led the Rockets to an upset of No. 8 Michigan and No. 19 Ohio State at the NCAA Regional Meet. UT placed a program-best third at the regional meet and earned the Midnight Blue & Gold a No. 21 national ranking. The Rockets concluded the year by placing 30th at the NCAA Championships.
After a ninth-place finish in conference in 2015, Nguyen and the Rockets bounced back in 2016 to take fifth at the conference meet. UT went on to place 11th in the NCAA Great Lakes Regional, missing a top 10 position by just 26 points.
Academically, UT landed 10 runners on the Academic All-MAC Team in 2014, with nine coming from the women’s squad. Both programs earned United States Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association All-Academic team honors, with the men’s team posting a 3.12 GPA and the women’s team posting a 3.42 GPA.
Over the past two years, Nguyen’s cross country teams have landed 20 Academic All-MAC selections, including the 2016 men’s team which garnered a conference-best eight awardees. The men’s and women’s teams posted GPAs of 3.038 and 3.546, respectively, in the fall of 2016.
Prior to coming to Toledo, Nguyen coached for 12 seasons at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, seven as the head coach of the men’s and women’s outdoor track and field teams.
The Spartans became a perennial contender in the Southern Conference under Nguyen, culminating in one of the best years in program history in 2011-12. Nguyen was named the conference cross country coach of the year in 2011 after leading both the men’s and women’s teams to conference titles. Paul Chelimo earned All-America honors under Nguyen’s guidance, the first runner in school history to earn that distinction.
In the 2012 outdoor track season, Nguyen coached Chelimo to a national runner-up finish in the 5,000-meter run, while Paul Katam finished first in the 10,000-meter run at the NCAA Regional Meet. Nguyen mentored Chelimo and Katam to NCAA runner-up finishes in the 5,000 meter and 10,000 meter runs, respectively, as the men’s team finished 15th at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. Chelimo would go on to win the silver medal in the 5,000m at the Rio Olympics.
Nguyen began his coaching career in 2000 as a volunteer assistant at his alma mater, Lynchburg College, before accepting an assistant position at UNCG in 2002. He spent four years as an assistant before taking over head coaching duties for the Spartans at the start of the 2006 outdoor track and field season.
In 2007, his first season as head coach of the UNCG cross country team, the Spartans saw immediate success. Nguyen led the men’s team to their highest finish in school history at the championship meet, placing third out of 11 teams. As a student-athlete at Lynchburg,
Nguyen earned eight all-conference selections and helped lead the cross country team to an Old Dominion Athletic Conference title in 1999. He graduated from Lynchburg in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in sports medicine, and earned his master’s degree in exercise physiology from UNCG in 2007.
Nguyen and his wife Christina have a son, Khoi, and younger twins, a boy, Liem and a girl, Vy Lan.
