Don Briggs

By BUCK MAHONEY
Hub Sports Editor

KEARNEY - Competition, even between father and son, has its standards.

So when John Laux, now a sophomore long jumper at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, started jumping farther and farther, he had a goal - beat his father's best.

But what was that distance?

His father, Ron Laux, retired football coach at Lexington, knew who to ask-Don Briggs.

"I don't know of a guy who keeps more records than Don Briggs does," Ron Laux said. "He knows. He's a walking encyclopedia."

Briggs has become a historian for UNK, said Kathy Livingston, who nominated him for this year's Freedom Award in the Athletics Category.

The nomination stemmed from "all the things he's done to try and get the historical things in order," Livingston said. "That effort took many hours, I'm sure.

"AND IF HE hadn't done it, I'm not sure if anyone else would have been able to resurrect those."

Briggs' association with UNK goes back to when it was Nebraska State Teachers College and he was a student. He graduated in 1951, received the school's first master's degree in 1957 and came back to work as the annual and newspaper adviser. Through the next few years, he ran the textbook library, taught classes, was the Alumni Association director and worked in public relations. One of his duties was providing information about the college's sports programs to the local media.

When Brendan McDonald became president of Kearney State College in 1972, Briggs lost his other duties and became the primary promoter of the Antelopes.

He held the sports information director post until he retired on June 30, 1990 - the day before KSC became part of the University of Nebraska system.

Since his retirement, he has been a busy man, and his projects center around UNK athletics and its former athletes.

"I'm trying to get their history written, because it hasn't been done before, and there are some holes there," Briggs said. "That's important for those kids, not only for history but for the athletes."

His most visual project includes photos from the college's past that hang in the Don Briggs Gallery in the lower level of the UNK Health and Sports Center. Team photos from the 1970s, '80s and early '90s hang on the north wall of the lower level. Most are from Briggs' personal negative collection.

However, some were reproduced from the Blue/Gold yearbook and other sources. The collection dovetails with team photos through about 1962 hanging in the hallway in Cushing Coliseum and the post-1990 team photos hanging in Main Street of the Health and Sports Center.

"The big problem was naming everybody … that took a lot of time," Briggs said.

Livingston said she has seen many former athletes pausing to study the photos in the Briggs gallery.

"DON'S EFFORTS have preserved much of our institutional heritage. Past athletes and their families can reminisce about what has already been accomplished. Future athletes can look at the composites Don has organized and see the proud tradition that athletics have sustained throughout the years at UNK," she said.

Another project Briggs completed was "Where the Antelopes Play," a booklet described on its cover as "A Brief Resume of 20th Century Kearney Athletics."

Impetus for the booklet came from Doug Banks, a former wide receiver on the football team who was working on his master's degree at UNK. Banks planned to use the book for his master's dissertation, but before the project was completed, he became the developmental officer for the Kansas State University athletics department.

Briggs saw the booklet through to completion and publication. Two thousand were printed, of which about 180 remain. A revised version of the booklet will be included in a book promoting UNK's upcoming centennial.

Briggs said he thought it was important to complete the booklet because "we needed a history of athletics here."

But his projects don't end there. He has helped build the UNK library's archive of information about UNK teams.

"I took to the library the records Charlie (Foster) had and the records I had. There are about 66,000 things that weren't there before," he said.

Those items include photos, statistics sheets, records and play-by-play sheets from Loper games.

The photos have been meticulously identified, helping preserve the history of Loper athletics.

Briggs took most of the photos. Basketball coach William Morris (1950-56), an amateur photographer, took some others. Others have come from other sources.

His current project is to update the track records. He is focusing on those races run in yards prior to the conversion to meters. His research has discovered several "holes" in the records and the list of letterwinners.

They are holes he thinks must be filled.

"As the (NAIA) district publication representative - I had all that. That was part of my job. And I guess that's when I came by it. I didn't want to cheat the athletes out of recognition," he said. "I always thought that was interesting. Important, I don't know."

But it certainly is important to the former athletes.

And they give him many projects to research.

"They're reaching retirement age, and they kind of like to know what's going on," Briggs said.

"They've got time to think about it, I think."

e-mail to:

buck.mahoney@kearneyhub.com