Duke Distance is really bad

Notre Dame followed by Princeton. To get better without injury, he will need time and not being pressured to step up immediately. Thise lrograms have been deep without relying on superstar, low mileage athletes to help them succeed in conference or nationals. Dipstick coaches dont give talented low mileage athletes time to develop and they end up dying a yo yo death of injury riddled careers. They quit and focus on their career which is fine but it doesnt have to be that way.

You don't have to go to NAU to get fast, you can get fast anywhere. It's not like Duke is on the North Pole and it's hard to train there. And yes the academics are way better at Duke. Paul Chelimo went to UNC Greensboro and he turned out okay. Duke is an above average P5 school in cross country. It's easy to say bad things when someone gets injured, but imagine if Heidesch didn't get hurt and actually got the volume and adapted to 10k really well. If he continued running 40-50 miles per week I don't think he'd run a very good 10k cross country race. And as you said, he had injuries early on in high school. Maybe the dude is just injury prone and he had a good 18 month stretch at the end of his high school career where he could actually show his potential.

You're definitely right about the need for more mileage if you want to be good in the 10k, but I think the main problem wasn't necessarily the mileage itself. I haven't seen Heidesch's strava, but from what I can tell from this thread, it seems like once he got to Durham his mileage jumped drastically, instead of a gradual buildup to that mileage over the summer, or his training mileage on campus was much greater than anything he built up to over the summer. Any decent coach should know to gradually ramp up their freshman athletes' mileage if they were a low-mileage athlete in hs(especially if they have an injury history). This doesn't seem to me like that unlikely of an outcome, especially with a coach with no distance running experience herself, as it's fairly easy to put together a workout plan even if you were never a distance runner, but it takes distance running experience to understand the implications of it. This seems to me like an inexperienced coach putting her low mileage, somewhat injury-prone freshman on the same workout plan as everyone else, and not realizing that it probably wasn't a good idea at the time.

Filling the missing piece at Duke

1) Outdoor roster: Over the past several years, Duke has had a respectable field, DMR, and sprint (especially 400m) roster. No doubt because of the expertise of the current coaching staff.

Several years ago I attended a Duke women's tennis match to watch the #1 recruit in the nation play. She was wearing a Duke uniform and playing in the #1 spot as a freshman. As it turns out, I was sitting next to her parents. She was also offered a full ride to Stanford. I asked them why they chose Duke. They responded, on the recruiting trip we were asked if we wanted to meet Coach K. They spent several hours with him in his office, and he actually walked with them to some of the athletic facilities.

3) Brand: In contrast, UNC is wallowing in the stench of the largest ethical scandal in the history of the NCAA, they have an unproven basketball coach, and they did not receive an invitation to the NCAA basketball tournament last year. The NCAAs are only for the top 68 teams. So, why would a basketball recruit go to UNC?

Thankfully, with Stanford joining the ACC, the dynamics regarding rivalry should change quite a bit. UNC actually voted against Stanford joining.

4) Distance coach: Who would be a good distance coach going forward?

Before we dig on Duke/reck too much… how about Wake/Braston? Wake has similar prestige as Duke but they put ALL 18 scollies into women distance and THEY ARE SO BAD. Like beyond. Ashley hasn’t shown she can coach her way out of a right hand turn without traffic. Wake is the school where athlete’s DEFINITELY go to die

Michelle Sikes Wake alum, 5000 national champion, Rhodes Scholar, author

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Michelle Sikes Outpaces Field to Win National Title in 5,000-Meter Run - Wake Forest University Athletics

June 9, 2007 SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Add National Champion to the impressive resume of Michelle Sikes . The senior capped a brilliant season by winning the...

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HJ, LJ, Discus, Multi.

The politics of the NCAA and lame coaches. Rhonda was the best thing for Duke and they messed it up and Duke could care less! Imagine letting the best coaches actually coach.

Duke and other P5’s only care about Football and Basketball

Yo... this was nearly 20 YEARS ago. The last 5 years the women have been 7-11 at ACCs; before Batson they were 4-6th place.

at the NCAA level they have not qualified A SINGLE PERSON to the xc, indoor, OR outdoor championship. NOT ONE for the entirety of her time there. With 18 full scholarships. WOW

Doubtful they have 18

UNC is worse!!!

how many girls have they recruited over the past 4 years that have paid zero dividends?

Doesn't Duke have multiple sub 1:50 runners running respectable times in the 8k? That's good enough for something not their speciality. Their DMR this year will win Penn

I guess we could just use our imaginations and dream up all kinds of scenarios instead of dealing with reality.

He ran a ton of races into the summer on the track. He most likely did not have time to recover and train for fall cc slowly and progressively to get his legs under him. He probably would have been redshirted by a better coach/program that would bring him along in a year and then release him against the competition next year. Justify it with a year to adjust to the rigor of Duke academics as well and supplement with a more relaxed approach to the training to keep some normalcy to his routines. This is called having a vision for a realistic plan the helps him develop for college level program vs a low mileage, late season level of readiness. As it is, hes out of commission and not getting better. It's not rocket surgery.

The big test this year is if Ryan Wilson, grad student from MIT and 3:55 miler, improves or not. If a coach fumbles the fastest DIII kid, from the most challenging DIII school, they don’t deserve their salary.

You can already see some of the senior transfers Winslow and keehan ran slower than at their previous school. A good bit of them didn’t even make it to ACCs

This is the question that's been on my mind. I was massively downvoted for questioning the report last spring that Ryan would transfer from MIT, where he could be a second-year graduate student now in a great academic program and an apparently excellent training and racing environment with solid coaching, to Duke, where the only upside seemed to be a chance for picking up some completely unnecessary D1 honors. I still haven't heard any explanation, or even response, to my comment. I thought that it could have something to do with looking for a better shot at the Trials, but I really don't see that.