Michael O’Quinn : Coach who believed in strength training
Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Michael “Mickey” O’Quinn, who pioneered the use of strength training in Arkansas high schools in the 1950 s and helped coach the Razorbacks in 1964 to their only national football championship, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock. He was 78.
O’Quinn, who coached various sports at Warren High School, wrote in an autobiographic sketch that his family e-mailed Tuesday that “putting his swimmers, tracksters, and basketball players on weight and plyometric drills prior to that time was considered a no-no !” One of O’Quinn’s four children, Kyle, said his father’s peers told O’Quinn that “The weight program will make you lose speed and quickness.” O’Quinn thought otherwise.
He obtained blueprints for exercise machines from research into Soviet and American Olympic training programs and had the equipment custom built at a local steel mill, his son said. His steely resolve in the matter was vindicated: Warren High School’s football team went 31-1-1 in 1961-63.
Born Aug. 23, 1929, in McRae in White County, O’Quinn grew up in Malvern. His mother moved him and his three siblings there to be closer to her family. In preschool, O’Quinn contracted rheumatic fever, which caused heart murmurs, and polio, which caused leg atrophy and a difference in his shoe sizes.
Darren O’Quinn spoke of his father’s feet: “He had a [size ] 8 on one and an 11 on the other.” O’Quinn told his son, Darren, that as a child he went to Arkansas Children’s Hospital for a foot operation. Thirty days later, he was ready to return home but wasn’t allowed to keep his crutch. Boarding the bus, “he was hopping on one foot. His foot wasn’t quite healed, but he had to learn how to walk on it anyway.
“ He got down to Malvern. No one was around so he was just kind of hopping down Main Street on one leg and somebody drove up to him and said ‘ Mickey, what are you doing ?’” His father explained the situation and got a ride home, Darren said. He recalled that his father used the story as a launching point for one of his favorite jokes: “He’d call up and say ‘ Hey, I’m down at the bus station. Can you come give me a ride ?’” O’Quinn’s disability didn’t prevent him from becoming an athlete.
After graduating from Malvern High School in 1947, O’Quinn played football for Little Rock Junior College, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He played center and linebacker on the team that won the 1949 National Junior College Rose Bowl Championship in Pasadena, Calif.
O’Quinn earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia in 1951, married Wanda Roe in 1954 and began coaching in Warren in 1956.
In 1963, the family moved to Fayetteville, where O’Quinn pursued a doctorate in education and served as strength trainer and linebackers coach for the Razorbacks.
The family moved to Arkadelphia in 1969, where O’Quinn later became athletic director at Henderson and retired in 1998. All the while, his family said, O’Quinn enjoyed reminiscing about his coaching days.
He made opposing teams dress in Warren High’s training room, Darren said. “Before the game, he had his team load every weight in the whole weight room. Invariably one of the [opposing team’s ] big old linemen would want to get up under the bench or leg press and try to lift it. [O’Quinn ] said ‘ They’d run out on the field and already be psyched out. ’”
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