BYU Women Earn Redemption, Alabama’s Doris Lemngole Wins Individual Title at 2024 NCAA Counry Championships

VERONA, Wis. – One year after a devastating defeat, the women of Brigham Young University are once again on top of the NCAA. BYU entered the 2023 NCAA cross country championships ranked #3 in the country and were leading at the 2k mark only to collapse to 14th place. It was the first time during coach Diljeet Taylor’s eight-year tenure that the Cougars had finished outside of the top 10, and for a coach who prides herself on peaking her teams for the biggest meets, it was a tough blow to stomach.

“[It was] my lowest moment in my coaching career,” Taylor said.

On an overcast Saturday morning, Taylor and BYU earned redemption, winning the team title – their second in five years – at the 2024 NCAA cross country championships at the University of Wisconsin’s Thomas Zimmer Championship Course. In a year without a truly dominant team, BYU outlasted the rest of the NCAA, scoring 149 points to take the title, the highest winning score since 2011.

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West Virginia, unranked in the USTFCCCA coaches’ poll as recently as October, took second with 164 points and Providence, ranked just 11th entering the day, finished a surprising 3rd with 183. Northern Arizona, seeking their first women’s title in program history in the team’s final race under outgoing coach Mike Smith, led as late as 4k but faded late and rounded out the podium with 206.

Individually, the race came down to a battle over the final 800m between the 3 favorites and 2023 runner-up Doris Lemngole of Alabama broke free of her former Crimson Tide teammate Hilda Olemomoi of Florida the final 400m to earn the victory in 19:21.0 for the 6k course on a day where temperatures dipped into the 30s. New Mexico’s Pamela Kosgei (19:27.8), who set a course record in winning Pre-Nationals on this course a month ago, had a good final 100m to overtake Olemomoi (19:28.7) for second as Kenya favorites finished 1-2-3. NC State sophomore Grace Hartman was the top American in 5th in 19:39.5.

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Full analysis below from a great day of racing.

*Deeper Women’s Results

BYU’s Latest “Butterfly Moment” Results in a National Title

BYU entered the 2023 NCAA meet believing they could challenge for the national title but wound up imploding over the final 5k. Lexy Halladay-Lowry, who was 27th at 4k in that race before fading to 103rd in the finish, said, in retrospect, that the team was “immature” and did not quite know what to expect.

“We failed last year,” Halladay-Lowry said. “We failed miserably.”

But before her team left the tent that day in Charlottesville, Taylor called them together and told them they would get through the disappointment.

“I remember coming back to my team and saying, ‘Just when the caterpillar thinks the world is ending, she becomes a butterfly,’” Taylor said.

That became one of the team’s mantras in 2024, with Taylor gifting her women butterfly necklaces that they wore on Saturday during the race.

The biggest of those butterfly moments came three weeks ago when Jenna Hutchins, BYU’s #3 runner at Pre-Nats, was ruled out for the rest of the year with an injury. At the same time, Halladay-Lowry was working through her own injury, with Taylor describing her as a “mermaid” for how much time she spent cross-training in the pool in the weeks before NCAAs.

But NC State won this meet a year ago despite losing one of their top women, Kelsey Chmiel, right before NCAAs. When Hutchins went down, Taylor preached to keep believing.

“I just reminded my women, embrace the imperfect,” Taylor said. “I think for my women, that served as such a good reminder because things aren’t perfect on race day, things aren’t perfect in practice. Sometimes you can panic in those moments, and we’ve done that in the past.”

BYU did not panic today. The plan was to show urgency at the start (get out well), calm in the middle (relax), and urgency at the end (kick it in). The Cougars executed the last part particularly well. At 4k, they trailed NAU 157-166, but picked up 19 places over the final 2k to secure the win. 

Carmen Alder was the hero for BYU today. In two previous appearances at NCAAs, Alder had massively underperformed, finishing 203rd in 2022 and 246th in 2023 (2nd-to-last). This year, she was an All-American in 39th after passing 10 women in the final 2k. Written on the inside of her wrist today? “Embrace the imperfect.”

Taylor knew going into the race that BYU probably would not have a top-10 finisher today. Usually, that is a death sentence: before today, only three women’s teams had won the NCAA title without someone in the top 10. But Taylor still believed BYU could win with their depth; given the strengths of the other teams, Taylor said she thought the winning score could be well over 100 points. She was proven correct.

BYU’s top woman, Halladay-Lowry, was 14th – the lowest #1 runner on any NCAA title-winning team in the 44-year history of the women’s meet. Relying on depth is nothing new for BYU, however. Of the (now) four teams to win without a top 10 finisher, three of those titles belonged to BYU.

BYU now has six women’s titles overall, which is second behind only Villanova’s nine.

Cream Rises to Top in Individual Race

The three pre-race favorites delivered big time on the women’s side. Doris Lemngole had run 14:40 for 5k on the roads before she ever stepped foot on the University of Alabama campus. She has now run an NCAA record of 9:15 in the steeple and was the runner-up last year at NCAA cross, yet that only made her the the #2 pick in the LetsRun.com prediction contest.

Why? Because the favorite was Pamela Kosgei, who not only won the bronze at the World Under 20 cross country championships last year, but is the sister of former marathon world record holder Brigid.

And then there was Hilda Olemomoi, who was teammates last year with Lemngole at Alabama, 4th at NCAA cross, and 2nd in the 5k and 10k outdoors.

While Kosgei was the favorite, any of the three women winning wouldn’t have been a total shocker and in the end, experience and class won out.

Expect to see this battle play out again in the future as the top five all return next year and Olemomoi was the only runner in the top five without at least two more years of eligibility.

Two American Sophomores Finish in the Top 10

American women had won the last three NCAA individual titles but a fourth always appeared unlikely after 2022 champ Katelyn Tuohy and 2023 champ Parker Valby turned pro following last year’s meet. Some even wondered whether there would be any American women in the top 10 today. But the future is getting brighter. 20-year-old redshirt sophomore Grace Hartman of NC State was 5th, 19-year-old true sophomore Paityn Noe of Arkansas was 7th. They both have some work to do in order to close the gap to the very best women but with two years of eligibility remaining each, they have time to do it.

The top non-Kenyan in the race was Stanford’s Amy Bunnage, who was 4th despite a very abbreviated season. The Australian Bunnage, who ran 15:23 as a high schooler in 2023, had been battling a foot injury and did not race this fall until the regional meet last week, which she won. Bunnage said she had only run four or five workouts before NCAAs but that was enough for her to finish 4th overall.

West Virginia from unranked to #2

Heading into nationals, West Virginia was ranked #4 in the country, so finishing second was not a total shocker, but the transformation over the year was amazing as they started out completely unranked. When they were first ranked #28 in the country in October, the school issued a press release noting it was their highest ranking since 2022 when they were ranked #25. 

They then finished 4th at Pre-Nats and getting on the podium was a possibility at NCAAs, but Sean Cleary‘s team took it to another level finishing 2nd being led by star Ceili McCabe, who finished 6th.

Oregon coach Shalane Flanagan knew the Ducks were doomed at 2k

Coming into NCAAs, the pundits were expecting a three-way battle for the title between BYU, Oregon, and NAU. NAU, the preseason #1 team in the country, lived up to the billing early as they led for the first 4k before fading to fourth over the final 2k.

Big 10 champ Oregon, however, never gave themselves a shot for the win. Oregon’s 5-6-7 all went out outside the top 100 and the Ducks were 12th in the team scoring at 1k and 8th at 2k. They did move from 7th at 5k to 5th at the finish — just four points off the podium behind NAU — as 3:59 runner Klaudia Kazimierska passed 31 people between 5k and 6k, moving up from 131st to 100th (77th in the team scoring).

Coach Shalane Flanagan said afterwards the plan was not to get out slow but a lot of her more track-centric runners are hesitant to go out hard.

In hindsight with how BYU ran, Flanagan didn’t think it was possible for Oregon to win today but she thought a podium finish was in the cards (and they missed that by four points).

“We weren’t capable of winning today [giving] a quick look at what BYU threw down. That was not in our cards today, but certainly a second through fourth was within our capabilities,” Flanagan said.

Providence impressed & reminds us cross country is a true team sport

The best team through their top three today was Ray Treacy‘s Providence Friars, who only came in ranked 11th and finished 3rd. Providence had three in the top 20 team scoring, but the problem in contending for the win was their 5th runner finished 98th in the team scoring (128th overall), 49 points behind BYU, so Providence had to settle for 3rd.

A very good performance for the #11-ranked team in the country and a huge roar went up when they were announced on the podium.

Treacy noted his #5 runner, freshman Anna Gardiner, had a great run as she is usually their #7. He said his team exceeded expectations across the board, but he’s been around long enough to know “the podiums are decided on a bunch of four and fives, not a bunch of top threes.”

BYU was pretty good at 1-2-3 (but behind #2 runner-up West Virginia and Providence in the scoring) but had the best #4 and #5 in the country and that is the recipe for victory.

Big 12 leads the conference rankings

In both the men’s and women’s races, the top two teams in the country came from the Big 12 which also produced the most All-Americans. In the women’s race, they tied with the ACC with 8 All-Americans (top 40 finish) but win out on a per school basis as there are 16 women’s teams in the Big 12 and 18 in the ACC.

NC State’s 3-year win streak was snapped but coach Laurie Henes says the future is bright

2022 NCAA champ Katelyn Tuohy talks about being at the meet as a spectator/volunteer coach

Mike Smith after his final NCAA xc meet as a coach

Talk about the race on our world-famous fan forum / messageboard:

• The Offficial 2024 NCAA D1 XC Championship Thread 
• When BYU starts recruiting Africans, its over for everyone else
• NCAA XC 2024 is ruined
• Why is BYU so dominant? 
• NAU women are the biggest failures of all time
• James Corrigan did NOT finish in BYU’s top 5
• Dave Smith is a bad coach 
• USA USA USA! AMERICAN BORN TEAMS WIN NCAA XC 2024
• Who is that Furman guy?