Story and photo by Marc Meyers, sports information director
(Spring 2008 issue)

Cleaning out will not be easy for Bob Leib. The walls of his Dearborn Gymnasium office are plastered with collages of laudatory news clippings and team photos—hand-made and heart-felt mementos from hundreds of student athletes he has coached at UMF over a career that spans 31 years and more than 1,200 contests.

Leib’s coaching career at Farmington is coming to an end this spring, as the mainstay of Prescott and Hippach fields is retiring from the helm of the women’s soccer and softball programs.

On October 25, Leib and four of his former class-of-2008 players will be inducted in the UMF Athletics Hall of Fame in a North Dining Hall ceremony.

“Every Hall of Fame event is a special experience that we look forward to,” said Director of Athletics, Fitness and Recreation Julie Davis. “This one will be extraordinary. Inducting Coach Leib along with a group of student-athletes who all played for him should create the opportunity to reconnect with a large cross section of former UMF student-athletes.”

The names of the other four inductees to the UMF Athletics Hall of Fame will be announced at a later date. For the announcement of inductees and ticket information, visit athletics.umf.maine.edu.

There are five teams and 55 individuals enshrined in the UMF Athletics Hall of Fame, including five former student-athletes coached by Leib.

“I am excited to join an elite group,” Leib said. “It’s always exciting to see my players get in. They are the ones who built things here.”

A native of Pennsylvania, Leib spent eight years as an assistant coach at the University of Delaware before deciding he wanted his own program at a smaller school. After five years, Leib and his wife, Cynthia, had settled. Farmington was their home.

“It was a perfect fit,” he said. “I was looking for a small school where you could be something and help in the community.”

Over more than three decades, Leib has amassed more than 700 victories in four sports at Farmington. He also holds winning records in all four: baseball (134-129-1); softball (247-156); men’s soccer (260-94-34); and women’s soccer (151-63-16). And in the community, Leib built soccer programs in the Farmington Recreation Department and held camps at Prescott Field.

Leib will be joining a group of fellow administrators and coaches who helped since his arrival on campus in 1977, such as Athletics Hall of Fame inductees Len MacPhee, Estella McLean, Dick Meader ’68, Brenda Obert, Tom Reynolds and Roger Wing.

“It will be exciting to join my mentors who guided me through here,” Leib said. “I was a coach from away, and they taught me how to be a Maineiac. I learned to kind of blend in and not get in the way.”

Leib, a coach of many accolades, has most recently been recognized as the North Atlantic Conference Softball Coach of the Year in 2003, and he led the team to an NCAA Division III tournament berth in 2005. He also guided the women’s soccer team to an undefeated regular season in the NAC last fall.

This isn’t the farewell party for Leib at UMF. He will continue in a teaching and administrative capacity in fall 2008 and remain to work on special projects for the Department of Athletics and Office of Alumni Relations until the spring of 2010.

But Leib’s voice will no longer echo commands to maroon-and-white clad players at the fields. He is proud of a longstanding practice of success on and off the field at Farmington.

“It’s been a top program all of the way back into the ’60s before me,” he said. “There’s a long tradition of quality student-athletes.