Kevin Galbraith begins his second season as the Northern Colorado head track & field and cross country coach.

In his first season as head coach, he led the women's team to a fifth place finish and the men's team to a sixth place finish at the 2005 NCAA Division I Independent Championships. Galbraith also led track & field athletes to 51 first place finishes in 2005. Under Galbraith, former track & field athlete Kelley Cobb garnered a No. 23 ranking in the javelin, the first national ranking for Northern Colorado in Division I.

Galbraith came to the Bears program after five years as an assistant track and field coach at Division I Long Beach State University.

Only the third head track and field coach in the past 20 years for Northern Colorado, Galbraith will help the program continue its reclassification process to Division I.

"This is a great opportunity and I am really excited to be here," Galbraith said. "As a Division I assistant coach I have been working toward this, and I want to help build something that has never been here before with the move to Division I. I want our program to compete against the best Division I teams in the region and work toward becoming competitively nationally. Having the school in transition makes this even more desirable for me."

Galbraith became an assistant at Long Beach State in 1999 where he was in charge of sprints and hurdles. For the 49ers, he coached the top three conference finishers in the men's 400 four out of five years, coached the top finalist at the 2004 West Regional Championships in the men's 110 hurdles and had the top freshmen finishers at the Big West Championships in each the men's and women's 400 the past three seasons. He also had a pair of freshman qualifiers for the USATF Junior Championships. The male in that event came in ranked 24th nationally but finished ninth. Galbraith graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a degree in communications in 1981.

At LMU he was a member of the Lion's cross country team and team MVP in 1981. He received his master's degree in communications from LMU in 1991.

Following his undergraduate degree and while he completed his master's, Galbraith was a volunteer assistant coach with Loyola Marymount from 1986-93. He has also served as the Meet Manager for the Southern California Cross Country Championships in Walnut, Calif. and the Southern California Twilight Distance Qualifier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

From 1993-95 and once again from 1997-99 he was an assistant track coach for sprints/hurdles at Track West, a national USATF club in Santa Monica, Calif.

In 1995, Galbraith became the head track and field coach at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, Calif. In his first year with the program, he helped a team that had finished last in the conference standings the previous year to a fifth-place finish in the 11-team league.