Art Venegas, USTFCCCA Coaches Hall of Fame Class of 2022

For more than 40 years, Art Venegas left an indelible mark on the sport of track & field.

Whether it was as an All-American thrower at Cal State Northridge, as a coach whose athletes dominated the collegiate and professional ranks or as a mentor whose charges have tutored their own champions and record-breakers, Venegas created a Hall-of-Fame legacy.

Venegas almost didn’t go into coaching. Story has it that Venegas planned to go to law school after earning double undergraduate degrees in political science and Spanish, but improved so much in his sophomore season at CSUN that his focus shifted to the nuances of the sport and learning how to make a difference with his knowledge of it.

So when former Matador assistant Frank Carl left the program after the 1975 outdoor season, he suggested to head coach Cliff Abel that Venegas take over the reins of the event group. It didn’t take long for Abel to decide and, as they say, the rest is history.

Venegas led CSUN throwers to three NCAA titles and nine All-America honors from 1976 to 1979. Steve Albright (1976, shot put), Norman Finke (1979, hammer) and Joe Straub (1979, discus) all won individual titles under Venegas’ direction and the Matadors finished third at the 1979 NCAA Division II Outdoor Track & Field Championships largely due to their throwers.

After a brief two-year stint at Cal State Long Beach (now known as Long Beach State), Venegas made his way to UCLA in 1982. And it is with the Bruins where Venegas created a juggernaut of a throws program, one that would decimate the collegiate ranks over the next 28 years.

Where does one start when it comes to detailing UCLA’s dominance in the throws under Venegas? Would they start with the 33 NCAA titles in those events? Or the more than 175 All-America honors? Perhaps it would be the 67 conference titles the Bruins won thanks to Venegas’ no-nonsense approach?

Here’s one way of looking at it: UCLA had a thrower on top of the podium at the NCAA Indoor or Outdoor Championships in all but four years between 1990 and 2002. There were four years during that span in which the Bruins double-dipped with at least one male athlete and one female athlete winning NCAA titles in the same year (1991, 1993, 1995 and 1996). It didn’t hurt that UCLA’s men scored in throwing events at each of the NCAA Championships since 1983.

The Bruins won so many NCAA titles under Venegas’ watch because he put numerous athletes in positions to compete at the biggest meets of the season. There are 18 instances of programs scoring four athletes in an event at the NCAA Championships as of 2021. Narrow it down even further, only seven of those 18 instances happened in throwing events in nearly 100 years. Of which, three belonged to UCLA with Venegas at the helm.

Many former Bruins still dot the collegiate record book in various ways.

John Godina, who won five NCAA titles under Venegas’ direction, still holds the collegiate shot-put record of 22.00m (72-2¼), which another former UCLA athlete held before him (John Brenner). On that note, Brenner and Godina are just two of the men Venegas coached who eclipsed the 22-meter mark in the shot put: Joe Kovacs and Darrell Hill are also in that group.

Suzy Powell and Seilala Sua are both among the top-10 best performers in collegiate history in the women’s discus at 65.22m (214-0) and 64.89m (212-11), respectively. And Sua is the only female athlete in the history of the NCAA DI Outdoor Championships to win four consecutive titles in the same throwing event, which she did from 1997 to 2000 in the discus.

After UCLA, Venegas continued coaching medal-winning throwers at the elite level and eventually retired from the profession after a stint as the Performance Consultant to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California.

Venegas’ legacy will endure, as many of his former athletes – like Brian Blutreich, Don Babbitt, David Dumble and John Frazier, among others – have carried on the championship and record-breaking tradition as coaches.

And, in the midst of his legendary career, Venegas was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the U.S. by Hispanic Business Magazine in October 1998.