A $1 million gift from Doug Odell ’75 is giving Occidental track and field a boost as it improves its facilities, strengthens its roster, and aims to compete at a higher level
The last time Occidental purchased new hurdles, track and field and cross country coach Rob Bartlett was an exchange student from England. “They came flat-packed to the staff and you had to screw them together,” he recalls. “One hundred hurdles arrived and every person on the team had to come out and spend half an hour over lunchtime putting those hurdles together.
“That was 23 years ago,” he says. “In order to have enough money for a purchase like that, you either need to save up for a very long time, or you need a generous donor.”
Doug Odell ’75—an Occidental Track and Field Hall of Famer and co-founder of Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado—is just such a donor. Occidental recently secured a $1 million gift from Odell to support the track and field program. Half is designated for the team’s endowment, and the other half for current expenditures to enhance the student-athlete experience over the next five years.
“Doug’s generosity is enabling us to do things we don’t often get to do,” Bartlett says. “Modern hurdles are not going to make someone a better hurdler, but they will make those hurdlers feel special and give them more pride in being an Occidental hurdler.
“When we are hosting track meets, we’ve always had the most beautiful track, but now we’ll have the best equipment too. We want to instill pride in our students in being an Occidental Tiger.”
Odell ran track as a student at Eagle Rock High School. “We lived a block down the street on Ridgeview, so I could walk to campus in a minute and a half,” he says. “When I graduated from high school, I wanted to go to Northern California. I liked the Bay Area.”
After a year and a half at Menlo College, he transferred to Occidental. Menlo was just a two-year school at the time, he says, and “it just seemed logical to go back to Oxy, with the track program being what it was.”
A third-generation Tiger, Odell arrived at Occidental during the heyday of track and field. His coach was Steve Haas ’63, himself an Oxy track standout who set school records in the 100, 220, 440 and 880 as a senior. During Odell’s three years with the team, Occidental won its 28th, 29th, and 30th consecutive SCIAC men’s track and field titles.
Odell contributed to the program’s continued success, becoming a two-time NAIA champion in the 440 hurdles and a member of the 1,600-meter relay team (Gene Taylor ’76, Odell, Malcolm Cleary ’77, and Sam Young ’76) that still holds the school record of 3:07.7. He’s still in touch with Cleary, who also ran the 800 meters as a Tiger.
“I came out of Occidental with a lot more confidence than when I started there, growing into who I am and experiencing a high level of success in track and field,” says Odell, who, with his wife and sister, started Odell Brewing in 1989 in a converted grain elevator and sold a majority stake to the company’s management team in 2015. “One of my motivations for this gift is that our track team is kind of mired in the middle of SCIAC. I wanted Rob to have more funding to do what he needs to improve the track program—and just to pad the overall budget.”
For Bartlett, the impact is both emotional and tangible. “First and foremost, it makes the student-athletes feel special,” he says. “That’s very qualitative, but the fact that they know that someone cares enough about their experience to do something this generous, it adds an extra layer of belonging and meaning. More quantifiably, it’s going to enable us to improve our facilities in a way that would take us decades without this gift.”
One long-sought improvement that is nearly within reach is a new scoreboard for Patterson Field and Jack Kemp Stadium, giving track a permanent scoreboard suitable for its meets. “We wanted it this year, but we put a pause on it,” says Director of Athletics Shanda Ness. “This is our one chance to get it absolutely right.”
Several of Oxy’s peer institutions already have large video scoreboards, bringing immediacy to the drama inside the stadium. When James Buellesbach ’28 won the conference title in the 110 hurdles at Redlands, Bartlett says, “There’s a great photo at the finish line of him just losing his mind. Within a couple of seconds of him crossing that line, everyone’s looking at the scoreboard and the times are flashing up, and you can see the emotion in James’ face: He knows that he won and that he ran a personal record. Without a scoreboard, you lose that a little bit.
“I’ve had scoreboard discussions for 15 years,” Bartlett adds. “We’ve known that this is something that would improve the experience for a really long time.” But the project was always prohibitively expensive, and funding it would mean taking money away from other priorities. Odell’s gift changes that equation. “We can still go on that travel trip. We can still buy the new javelins—all the basic stuff that you have to do. We can still do that, and now we can make this a reality.”
“Doug’s generosity gives us the foundation to purchase a scoreboard that will improve the in-person experience not only for track and field but for Oxy’s soccer and lacrosse programs as well,” Ness says. Because Odell’s gift is designated for several priorities, additional funding is needed to bring the $300,000 scoreboard project to completion by the start of the 2027-28 academic year.
Dating back to the Payton Jordan era—a decade during which Division III Oxy regularly competed against Division I titans such as USC and Stanford—the Tigers won 41 SCIAC titles in men’s track and field between 1946 and 1990. Occidental’s most recent men’s championship came in 1998, while the women last won the conference in 1991.
The competition has leveled up dramatically since Bartlett joined the program as an assistant to then-head coach Troy Engle in 2005. With the addition of longtime Division II member Azusa Pacific University this fall, the SCIAC will have 10 full-time member schools, up from eight in 2005. Of the 42 Division III conferences nationwide, Bartlett says, “The SCIAC has gone from close to the bottom of the pyramid to near the top. Now to win a conference title as an individual, you’re probably performing at an All-American level.”
Case in point: Occidental sent two men’s track and field athletes to the 2026 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track & Field Championships in May. SCIAC Track Athlete of the Year Shane Kawakami-Williams ’27 competed at Nationals for the second consecutive year, qualifying in the 100 and 200 meters. In March, he posted a program and personal best 10.40 in the 100, the fastest time in Division III at the time. Buellesbach made his first NCAA Championships appearance after setting the fastest 110-meter hurdles time in Oxy history at 14.15 seconds. He finished 13th at Nationals, earning Second Team All-America honors.
Both athletes will return to the Tigers in 2027. “This is going to be the best team we’ve had in a decade in terms of quality and in terms of depth,” Bartlett says. “This year, we’ll have 104 student-athletes on our roster. We have depth, we have talent, and we have student-athletes who are invested.
“Winning and losing is an outcome we can’t control,” he adds. “The metrics we can track are a little different. We track things like, how many of our athletes are getting all-time Oxy top 10 marks? Or how many of our kids are going to Nationals? How many of our kids are getting on the podium at conference? All of those things have been going up for the last few years.”
The most visible change to the Tigers this year will be the new home and away uniforms for both track and cross-country—thanks again to Odell’s generosity. Between getting married and recruitment calls, “I haven’t ordered them yet,” Bartlett admits—but with the start of the school year just weeks away, he’s close to choosing a final design. “All my players will have new uniforms,” he says. “Change is good.”
Top photo: Shane Kawakami-Williams ’27 raced to victory in the 100- and 200-meter dash in the SCIAC Quad Cup Championship at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps on March 28. (Photo by Sam Leigh/Sam’s Photo Services)
