It seems all too fitting that when a book project about legendary Wayne State University track coach D.L. Holmes looked like it wouldn’t make it to the finish line, the “baton” was picked up by his grandson, Keith Wunderlich.
The handoff occurred because Wunderlich’s uncle David L. Holmes Jr., who had started the project, had moved into an assisted-living facility. Although David “was delighted to be able to pass it on,” Wunderlich says, it wasn’t initially smooth. “When I inherited [David’s] boxes and boxes of stuff, in there was also a draft of a novel,” Wunderlich says.
“It was fiction, and it wasn’t about coach Holmes. It was about coach Watson. And the interviews [that David had done with past members of Wayne State’s track team] were only being used as reference points for stories that he would build on and then fictionalize within this book.”
Wunderlich, though, was far more interested in the interviews themselves, so Holmes Jr.’s transcripts appear between more-conventional narrative chapters in the newly released Wayne State University Press book Coach of Champions: D.L. Holmes and the Making of Detroit’s Track Stars.
“I thought [the interviews] were a piece of history,” Wunderlich says. “And all but one of the people who were in the interviews had passed away. So they were all lost stories, unless I kept them as part of the book somehow.”
Originally from Oklahoma, D.L. Holmes was a track star (and an Olympic hopeful) himself before landing at Detroit Junior College (which later became Wayne State University), where he coached track from 1917 to 1958. Though his team (then called the Tartars) always lacked funding, equipment, and appropriate facilities, Holmes nonetheless managed to build a respected program that produced a handful of Olympians and All-Americans.
He specialized in breaking down the ideal form and approach for every track and field event, tailoring individual daily workouts for each athlete, and he was an innovator, creating things like the “Holmes Folding Hurdle” and a lap-timing device called the “Pace Setter.”
But athletes mostly remember him as an encouraging father figure who almost never expressed anger, cursed, or drank and who made do with subpar training conditions. (When indoors, it took 22 revolutions around a raised track in the university’s Old Main building to run a mile, and hurdlers often practiced in the hallways.)
But more important than all that was the way Holmes, and Wayne State, sought out and welcomed students of all kinds in an age of rampant discrimination.
John Lewis, a track star who would earn a spot on the 1928 U.S. Olympic team, “was the first Black captain of any team at Wayne State,” Wunderlich notes. “And that was in 1929, when that was not a thing at all. …
[When the team traveled, Holmes] didn’t make a huge deal about it, but he went places where he knew everybody could walk in and eat or sleep. They would share rooms, too. It was no big deal. … It was just so normal that people of different races and ethnicities and religions would be together.”
Though D.L. Holmes died when Wunderlich was just 3 years old, he’s heard stories about his grandfather all his life, from relatives as well as from Wayne State athletes who’d trained with Holmes. Many loved him like a father, and after writing this book, Wunderlich feels closer to him, too.
“I told myself as I was writing it and putting it all together,” he says, “that even if I never get a publisher, I’m just so happy to put all this information together so that future generations can have this.”
This story originally appeared in the August 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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