James Henry Kehoe, Jr. (June 3, 1918 – January 17, 2010) was an American athletics coach and university administrator. He served as the athletic director at the University of Maryland from 1969 to 1978, during which time he was responsible for the hiring of future Hall of Fame coaches Lefty Driesell, Jerry Claiborne, Bud Beardmore, and Chris Weller. Early life and military service Kehoe was born on June 3, 1918, in Bel Air, Maryland. In high school, he was a state champion runner. Kehoe enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1936 and competed in track and field, in which he excelled as a middle-distance runner. He set school records in the two-mile run and 880-yard run. He graduated from Maryland in 1940. After college, Kehoe joined the United States Army and served in the Pacific during World War II. Professional career After the war, he returned to the University of Maryland as its track and cross country coach in 1946. During his tenure, he built the programs into a national powerhouse and won multiple conference championships. When he retired from coaching, his track teams had a 27-meet winning streak and his cross country teams a 29-meet streak. Kehoe's teams had captured 48 cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track championships in the Southern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference. In 1969, Kehoe resigned from his coaching positions to take over as the university's athletic director with the task of turning around the struggling football and basketball programs. In his sixth week on the job, Kehoe hired Lefty Driesell as the new basketball coach, and said it was "a new era in athletics at the University of Maryland... top drawer, all the way and nothing less." Driesell, after he had promised to make Maryland the "UCLA of the East", helped form the basketball program into a perennial NCAA tournament contender. In his first year, he also fired the head football coach, former Maryland star Bob Ward who was embroiled in a player revolt and had compiled a 2–17 record over two years. Kehoe took an unorthodox approach by hiring Roy Lester, a highly successful area high school coach, as Ward's replacement. The plan did not work, however, and after three years and a 7–25 record, Kehoe fired Lester as well. He stated his plans to make Maryland a "nationally ranked caliber team" and that the perennial losing and low attendance would