There aren’t many people who can offer up the total package of service and commitment to Augustana athletics like Greg Wallace. He was a standout athlete in two sports, has been a highly successful coach and served the department in an administrative role for six years.
Wallace was a three sport standout at Belvidere High School in Belvidere, Illinois and during his freshman year he decided not to play football, which was ironic because he would later quarterback the Vikings to two straight NCAA Division III national championships in 1985 and 1986. Instead, he played basketball on the junior varsity team and cracked the starting lineup in baseball, first as a shortstop and later moving to the outfield.
He decided to play football in 1985 and three games into the season, starting quarterback Kirk Bednar went down with a knee injury. Wallace stepped into the breach and helped guide the Vikings to the NCAA championship with a 20-7 victory over Ithaca in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl. In the key game of the season, a 9-3 win over Millikin on a rainy homecoming, Wallace threw a touchdown pass to account for the winning score.
He would never pile up big numbers in head coach Bob Reade’s grind-it-out offense but he was the perfect field general for the Vikings at the time. The most striking statistic was the gaudy 31-1-1 record he fashioned as a starter. During his junior year, Augustana suffered a 0-0 tie at Elmhurst to start the season but bounced back to finish the year 12-0-1, including a 31-3 demolition of Salisbury State in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl.
During his senior year he was the trigger man for an offense that averaged 42.4 points per game. He was the team captain that year and in a 38-36 loss at Dayton in the second round of the NCAA playoffs he set school playoff records for most passing attempts (29), most completions (13), most passing yards (287) and most touchdown passes (3).
When he wasn’t helping the Vikings win football games, he was excelling on the baseball diamond. A four year letter winner and starter, he was team captain in 1988 and was selected the team’s MVP in 1987. Twice (1986 & 1987) he was named first team all-conference. At the time of his graduation he held the school record for career at-bats (365) and career runs scored (82). He was second in career hits (116), third on the all-time doubles list with 23, third in career stolen bases (27), and fourth in career base-on-balls (60).
He graduated in 1988 with a degree in business and eventually received his Master’s of Education and MBA from Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland. He coached football and baseball at Frostburg State, compiling a record of 78-49 as the head baseball coach from 1992-95.
Wallace came back to Augustana in the summer of 1995 and assumed the head baseball position in time for the 1997-98 school year. He has posted a 387-177 record as the Vikings’ head baseball coach and three times he led Augustana into the NCAA Division III national tournament. The Vikings have won over 30 games seven times during the school’s history in the sport of baseball and all of those occurred with Wallace as the head coach.
He was a major factor in the building of the Swanson/Brunner Baseball Complex that has served as the home of the Vikings since the 2004 season. Wallace served as the school’s director of men’s athletics from 1998 through the 2004 school year and was a major factor, along with Liesl Fowler, director of women’s athletics, in the reinstatement of the Tribe of Vikings “Hall of Fame” in 2002.
Greg and his wife Rona have two sons, Cayton and Trenton, and reside in Rock Island.
