CU Athletic Hall of Fame
- Induction:
- 2014
- Class:
- 1955
- 1955 All-American at 130 lbs (3rd)
- 1957, '58 US National Team
- Coached wrestling from 1961-68
- Program best 4th place finish (tie) at NCAA meet
Lettered four times in both wrestling and baseball at CU (1952-55), was a student assistant wrestling coach in 1956 and would return as head coach of Colorado’s wrestling team for eight seasons, 1961-68 ... As an athlete, he placed second in the 130 lbs. weight class in the 1953, 1954 and 1955 Big 7 Conference Wrestling Championships ... As a senior, he was third in the NCAA Championships (130 lbs.), garnering All-America honors in the process ... A member of Team USA in 1957 and 1958 and was an Olympic team alternate on three occasions ... Had several NAAU accomplishments, including one title (1960), a runner-up effort (1966) and a third place (1963) ... Also had three top four finishes in NAAU Greco Roman competition .... His pinnacle moment as CU’s coach came in 1964, when he led the Buffaloes to their best finish ever in the NCAA Championships, a tie for fourth place, trailing only Big 8 Conference rivals and national powers Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Iowa State ... Four of his teams posted top 20 NCAA finishes, the second best a tie for 13th in his last season at CU ... He coached three Buffs to individual national titles (two by Dean Lahr, one by Bob Justice); he also coached Lahr to the 1964 Olympic Trials championship (Lahr, a member of CU’s Hall of Fame, had a long list of accomplishments he directly credited to Long) ... In his eight years at Colorado, he coached eight different All-Americans (earning 13 recognitions in all) ... His CU teams were 85-59-3 over those eight seasons (77-41-3 the last six years) ... He left CU in 1969 for the head coaching position at Southern Illinois, a move that almost doubled his salary but also a school that had more than twice the budget for the sport than CU had earmarked ... He coached at SIU for 14 years and finished with a combined college record of 203-152-6 ... His influence was so great that 19 of his former athletes went on to become wrestling coaches ... One-time chairman of Greco Roman Wrestling in the Rocky Mountain Region ... In 2007, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Service to Wrestling Award by the Colorado Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame ... After graduating from CU in 1956, he was in the U.S. Army for two years (he was the All-Army wrestling champ in 1958 at 136½ lbs.) ... He then returned to Colorado to work on his Master’s degree and was named CU’s head wrestling coach at the age of 27 ... he continued his amateur career while coaching the Buffs ... A Boulder native who prepped at Boulder High School.
