Bruce Craddock


Richard Bruce Craddock was an American football coach. He was the head football coach at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois and he held that position for seven seasons, from 1983 until 1989. His record at Western Illinois was 41–35–1.

Career

Craddock was a graduate of Northeast Missouri State University, now Truman State in 1966, where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. After serving in the Vietnam War his several career stops began at Northeast Missouri State where he was appointed as an assistant coach from 1970-72. He hired on as an assistant coach at the University of Vermont from 1972-74 and returned to Northeast Missouri from 1975-78 before briefly assuming head coaching duties there. He was a guest coach for the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League from 1979-82. He returned to the U.S. when he was named as Head Coach for the Western Illinois University Leathernecks in 1982.

Death

Craddock died on February 22, 1990, aged 46, after a 10-month battle against cancer in a Macomb, Illinois hospital. Physicians linked the cancer to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, where he was a Marine captain from 1967 to 1970.