When Lt. Col. Garrett Hines ’92 speaks, he does so with the quiet, almost monastic certainty of a man who has spent much of his life surrendering himself to forces larger, faster, and, as it turned out, colder than he might have once imagined.
A three-time Olympian in the sport of bobsledding, a silver medalist in the 2002 Winter Games, and a career Army officer, Hines has spent decades in motion, be it in high school football, track and field, hurtling down iced tracks at highway speeds, navigating the stern choreography of military life.
Every step of the way, he’s been coaxing more from his body and mind.
The Education of an Athlete
Hines was born in Chicago and raised in Bartlett, Tennessee, where he became a celebrated high school athlete in football, as well as track and field. By his senior year in the late 1980s, he was fielding offers from colleges across the country. The choice crystallized when Southern Illinois University wide receiver football coach Charlie Strong appeared in his living room, a figure who would loom large in the next stage of his life.
“Coach Strong came to my house, and right then I knew,” Hines says. “That was the place. That was the fit.”
SIU offered him football, track under Saluki Hall of Fame Coach Bill Cornell, and a slate of academic programs—pre-med, biological sciences, chemistry—that promised intellectual rigor he did not, by his own admission, fully anticipate. The coursework was demanding, but Hines forged ahead, graduating a semester early and staying another term to finish out his track career. He imagined football might carry him further.
It did not. But something else, something unexpected, did.
A Flyer, a Drive, and a Race Down the Ice
The pivot point arrived surreptitiously -- a teammate handed him a flyer. Try Out for Bobsled Pilot — Lake Placid.
Hines had never seen a bobsled. Nevertheless, he and his teammate got in a car and drove twenty-two unbroken hours from Carbondale to Lake Placid, New York.
The tryout was comically austere. Pay a small daily fee. Take a physical test. If you passed, you were handed a room key and allowed to stay. Hines passed.
Within weeks, he was recruited by an Indiana-based bobsled driver who recognized his power, speed, and seriousness. Six months after that, he was competing internationally. In late 1993, he was racing in Italy, breaking a record, setting another, and realizing that the strange, icy theater of bobsledding had found a permanent place for him.
He was hooked, but not only on the speed. There was camaraderie, too, the particular solidarity of men who spend their lives in a controlled form of chaos.
The Soldier-Athlete
The next turn in his life arrived through fellow athletes who told him about the U.S. Army’s World Class Athlete Program, which allows elite athletes to train while serving in the military.
He began exploring the program in the months before the 1994 Olympics. By 1996, he had joined the Georgia National Guard as a medic; in 1998, he commissioned as an officer in public health and preventive medicine.
Hines is currently an Environmental Science Officer with his current unit, the Defense Health Agency in Aberdeen, Maryland.
Basic training, for all its clichés, delivered something real.
“I thought I had already pushed myself to the limit as an athlete,” Hines says. “But the drill instructors showed me there was another level.”
He returned from basic training with a mind sharpened by what the military teaches so well -- that there is more inside you than you believe.
Salt Lake City and the Long Run of Persistence
Across those years, Hines competed in four Olympic cycles, eventually taking home a silver medal in the 4-Man Bobsled in Salt Lake City in 2002. It was not just a personal triumph but the beginning of a medal streak for U.S. bobsledding that has continued through every Games since.
All the while, Hines balanced military service, family life, and the incremental rituals of a civilian career: a master’s degree in public health in 2014, managerial work in the private sector, and service with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His life resembled a triptych—athlete, soldier, student—each panel informing the other.
The Coach
In 2020, Hines returned to WCAP—not as an athlete, but as a coach, the older version of the person he once needed. Today, as assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic Bobsled Team preparing for the 2026 Games, he is a kind of institutional memory on ice.
“I had coaches who changed me,” he says. “High school, college, the Army—there were instructors whose voices I still hear.”
Coaching, he suggests, is not simply instruction—it is the shaping of a psychology, the delicate work of helping an athlete win “the battle between who you are and who you could be.”
The Architecture of Support
Like bobsledding, Hines’s life has had unlikely turns, good and bad, but underpinning it is a level of support from family, friends, and mentors, all of whom have offered him the encouragement and space to become the person and professional he has.
“Family is your bedrock,” he says. “And the Army gave me the resources and support most athletes never get—time, travel, training, and the chance to represent something bigger than myself.”
Nearly three decades into service, he speaks with a gratitude that feels neither performative nor expected.
“Every day I wake up and get to do something I love—train athletes, give back, represent my community. It doesn’t get better. I’m proud. Proud of this career, this journey, all of it.”
The Last Descent, and What's Next
Milano Cortina in 2026 will be his final Olympics before retirement. But retirement, for Hines, is a gentle redirection rather than a braking mechanism. He imagines taking time off, continuing work in the Army community, mentoring younger athletes, and maintaining the forward motion that has been the quiet engine of his life.
From a Tennessee high school to SIU’s fields and laboratories, from an impulsive twenty-two-hour drive to Lake Placid to the precise corners of the world’s fastest ice tracks, from a National Guard medic to a respected officer and Olympic coach—Garrett Hines has built a life not around winning, but around the relentless pursuit that makes winning possible.