Major honours
The women's track team of Tennessee State, a historically Black university in Nashville, and the organization that laid the foundation of American women's sprinting. Ed Temple, who led the team for more than 40 years starting in 1953, built champions with essentially no budget and no proper track — early on, athletes trained on a dirt track and traveled for meets under the South's segregation laws. Even so, Tigerbelles won more than 20 Olympic medals, including 13 golds, between 1948 and 1968. At Rome 1960, Wilma Rudolph, who had overcome the after-effects of polio, won a triple crown in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay to become the first great women's track star of the television era, and Wyomia Tyus became the first person to defend an Olympic 100m title, winning in both 1964 and 1968. Madeline Manning won the 800m in 1968. Temple also coached the US women's Olympic team in 1960 and 1964.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
It took the lead from the Tuskegee Institute, which had dominated American women's athletics through the 1930s and 40s, and the rivalry between the two historically Black universities that followed became the very lineage of American women's sprinting.