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Oregon, UCLA, Stanford and USC had what seemed to be entitled access to the West’s top sprinters, jumpers and distance runners. It was like being stuck in a league with the Dodgers and Yankees.

Arizona coach Fred Harvey, appointed head coach in 2002, did the best he could and then some. With a thin NCAA limit of 12½ total scholarships to spread over a team of about 45 athletes — and with the Pac-12’s least appealing track facility, the remote and uninspiring 42-year-old Drachman Stadium — Harvey somehow kept turning out All-Americans to match any UA sport: Lawi Lalang, Brigetta Barrett, Brianna Glenn, Jordan Geist, Nick Ross, Georganne Moline. And on and on.

He did more with less, a lot less.

Yet in 2011, Harvey became the second coach in league history to become both the men’s and women’s Pac-12 Coach of the Year.

My enduring memory of Harvey is of a late Saturday night in May 2011. He stood near the high jump pit at Drachman Stadium and started to cry. “I’m soft and sentimental,� he said, wiping away tears.

His men’s track team had just finished second to mighty Oregon in the Pac-12 championships, and then matched it by finishing second to the Ducks women’s team before a crowd of almost 5,000. It was the highest moment in UA track and field history.

“I don’t think people know how difficult this was,� UA athletic director Greg Byrne said.

Last week, Harvey announced his retirement, 38 years in the books. More than 250 people responded favorably to a Facebook announcement of his departure. I can only imagine how often the soft and sentimental track coach wiped away tears.

The man who hired Harvey in 1986, Arizona Hall of Fame track coach Dave Murray, was similarly emotional. “I love Fred like one of my sons,� said Murray. “He calls me his second father. He’s part of my family, like an uncle to my grandkids. He’s just a special person.�

If there’s such a thing as an unqualified American success story, it’s Fred Harvey.

The seventh of 10 children to Savannah McCullough, born in the economically-challenged area east of San Jose, Fred became the only person in his family to get a college degree. He sadly watched as four of his siblings spent time in prison.

After graduating from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, Harvey became a volunteer track coach at his alma mater. For seven years, he wasn’t paid a dime to do so. He worked 9 to 5 as a corrective therapist at a school for children with developmental disabilities, went to track practice, and then worked until midnight with his wife, Janet, cleaning office buildings.

Finally, in 1987, Murray hired him and by 1992, Harvey was in Barcelona, Spain, at the 1992 Olympics. His sprinter extraordinaire, Amphitheater High School grad Michael Bates, won the bronze medal at 200 meters.

Before the Olympics, I had asked Harvey if he would call me from Barcelona if Bates — no one’s idea of a favorite — somehow won a medal. Good to his word, about 2 a.m., in Spain, my phone rang. It was Harvey.

As he began to tell me about Bates’ epic race from Lane 1, Harvey’s voice choked and, no surprise, he became sentimental and soft.

“I’m so proud of Michael,� he said.

It is now the UA track community’s time to be proud of Fred Harvey, a class act, for a job well done.