Valley Community-Coach
IATC Hall of Fame, 2025
He says he didn’t WIN a lot when he was in school, but he loved to compete and soon found out he had a special knack for making those around him better.
Lowell Lyngaas was raised on the family’s century farm in Northeast Iowa and knew the value of hard work. He joined the US Air Force after graduating from high school in 1972. He had grown to be about 6 feet tall and was on the Grand Forks Air Force Base volleyball team. Soon after, Lowell learned through this experience and basic training, he was pretty good at athletics.
In the spring of 1974, he started to train for the decathlon, and with one year of training he was able to score over 7000 points.
Soon after, his father became ill and needed help on the farm.
In 1983, he was milking cows at noon and midnight, officiating lots of basketball games in between, and through a Veterans Affairs program was taking courses at Luther College to become a coach. While at Luther he had the opportunity to be a student assistant coach for track and field.
Lowell was the head girls track coach at Valley Community High School in Elgin for 28 years, his teams were state team runners up 3 times, had 12 event champions and set what was, the state meet record in the 4×4 and 4×8. He was the head boys Cross Country Coach for 27 years with 2 teams finishing in the Top 12 at state.
He had great success with those 2 sports, but Girls Cross Country was his real bread and butter. In his 26 years at the helm, Valley won 3 state team titles and was a runner up once. They also won 49 District, Conference or Invitational meet titles.
During his time at Valley Community he also coached Junior High Track and Field and Cross Country, and JV Girls Basketball. After retiring from Valley, he coached Cross Country, Track and Field and Football at Postville. A tried-and-true Jack of All Trades.
Lowell loved competition in general and loved state meet competition even more, because, as he says, it brought out the best of everyone. He loved the “coaching chess matches” with the likes of Mark Bauder at Central Elkader and Kevin Kearney and Scott Conway at South Winn.
Coach Lyngaas had been running and competing since second grade, until this year. His health now, unfortunately, has limited his physical activity. But the decades of involvement with athletics and coaching and seeing the growth and success of his athletes has been so very rewarding.
Lowell and his wife Rita still live on the family farm. They have three children, Grant, Anna and Maya who has recently blessed them with their first grandchild, Travis.