Don Lukens, a hall-of-fame cross country and track coach who spent years working at Traverse City Central High School, passed away on Sunday at the age of 90. Lukens coached the Trojans from 1989 to 2021, working alongside longtime head coach John Lober to build Central’s distance running program into one of the best in the state. Along the way, he won several coach of the year awards from the Michigan Interscholastic Track Coaches Association (MITCA) and the Michigan High School Coaches Association (MHSCA), as well as numerous other prestigious recognitions.

A graduate of Western Michigan University, Lukens spent much of his career coaching at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo. His success with the running programs there led to coach of the year honors from the MHSCA in 1986 and from MITCA the following year, as well as an induction into the MITCA coaches hall of fame.

Lukens retired from Loy Norrix at 55 and moved to northern Michigan with his wife Rosinda, building a home on the banks of the Platte River in Benzie County. It wasn’t long, though, before word got around that a hall-of-fame coach had put down roots at the tip of the Mitten.

In the spring of 1989, Pete Moss – then the track coach at Benzie Central High School – knocked on Lukens’ door and asked if he could help with the team’s pole vaulters. Lukens agreed. Then, a few months later, at the end-of-season Traverse City Record-Eagle Honor Roll track meet, John Lober, the head track coach at Traverse City Senior High School, approached Lukens and asked if he’d be interested in working with the school’s distance runners. By the fall of 1989, Lober and Lukens were coaching the Trojan boys cross country team together.

Lober and Lukens proved to be a dynamic duo. According to an MHSAA.com writeup from back in August 2017, when Lober stepped away from Central’s cross country team, the two “had the fourth best [boys cross country] program in state in the 1990s, based on MHSAA finals finishes – despite the fact that the school was split in 1997.” Lober and Lukens sent their cross country squads to the MHSAA Division 1 state finals for the first 16 years of their tenure. That streak broke in 2005, with the Trojans failing to qualify for the state championships as a team. A year later, though, Traverse City Central rallied, not only qualifying for the cross country finals, but scoring a third-place team finish.

Lukens continued coaching at Central until 2021, finally stepping aside after 32 years at the school and 62 years of coaching overall. Beyond strong team and individual performances from his runners, he was also named MITCA’s assistant track coach of the year in 2015 and honored with the inaugural Coaching Legacy Award at the Record-Eagle Honor Roll meet in 2019. Lukens is also part of the MHSCA hall of fame, to which he was inducted in 1998. He’s one of just a few Traverse City Central coaches to be a part of that hall of fame, along with Lober (inducted in 1996), Lober’s brother Bob (a 22-year Trojan golf coach, inducted in 2006), Trojan football legend Jim Ooley (inducted 1993), and long-time tennis program leader Larry Nykerk (inducted in 2018).

“Today, September 15 we lost one of the great high school coaches of all time as Coach Don Lukens crossed the finish line for the final time,” the Traverse City Central Boys Track program shared via its Twitter account yesterday. “A Memorial service will be planned for later this fall or in the spring.”

Pictured: Lukens (left) and Lober (right) during their TC Central tenure.