PRAIRIE VIEW – There are a lot of words you could use to describe the career of former Prairie View A&M women's track and field coach Barbara Jacket.

Illustrious. Unprecedented. Trailblazing. Legendary. Historic.

All of these words would be fitting descriptors for one of the greatest coaching tenures – regardless of gender – that the sport has ever seen.

Whatever word you settle on, perhaps the best compliment one could pay Jacket is that in a way, she coined the motto toward which PVAMU Athletics directs its efforts: Where Champions Are Built.

The Port Arthur, Texas native basically laid the groundwork for what the women's track and field program is today. Forming the school's program in 1965 amid little to no financial support – scholarships for female athletes were a pipedream prior to Title IX legislation – and a largely unbalanced women's sport sector, Jacket hoped to feed the flame of competition that still burned within her, dating back to her days as a dual-sport athlete at Tuskegee University (then Institute).

She did more than that. From her first day on the job until her retirement from the post in 1991, the conversation about the top track program in the Southwestern Athletic Conference – and arguably the nation – began and ended with Prairie View A&M.

Consider this: In Jacket's 25-year tenure as coach of the Lady Panthers, the team won 23 SWAC championships. Jacket was named SWAC Coach of the Year – either for indoor track, outdoor track or cross country -- on 23 occasions and NAIA Coach of the Year five times.

Her teams won nine NAIA outdoor track championships; all of them consecutively from 1982-90. No other team has won more than five.

Also, 57 of her student-athletes became All Americans, and five of them competed in the Olympics.

Speaking of that, did you know that she also coached the 1992 United States Women's National Track and Field team in the Olympics? She's only the second African-American woman to earn that distinction. That squad won four gold medals, three silver and three bronze, a total that represented the largest medal haul for the American women in nearly 40 years.

Jacket went on to become the first woman to hold the athletics director position at a SWAC school, serving PVAMU in that capacity from 1990-95. Jacket is also the first woman to be inducted into the SWAC Hall of Fame and has also been inducted into the NAIA, International Women's, Drake Relays, Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Texas Women's, Texas Black Coaches, Texas African-American, Prairie View A&M and Tuskegee University halls of fame.

So how do you truly classify a legacy like Jacket's with proper justice and reverence?

Hmm … let's go with Greatest of All Time.