NC State repeats as women’s cross country national champions. Pack’s Tuohy sets record
The N.C. State women’s cross country team repeated as national champions on Saturday, and delivered the Wolfpack its fourth NCAA team championship during a commanding performance at the Division I cross country championships in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Four Wolfpack runners finished among the top 25 in the 6K race, including Katelyn Tuohy, a sophomore who quickly broke from the pack and outran Parker Valby, a sophomore from Florida, to finish first. Tuohy’s time of 19:27.7 set a course record. She became N.C. State’s 45th individual NCAA national champion, and fourth in women’s cross country.
“She’s been just spectacular since she was 15 years old,” Wolfpack coach Laurie Henes said during a phone interview, “and to have somebody be able to, you know — it doesn’t always happen that those same athletes that are totally crushing people in high school do the same thing in college.
“She’s just so level-headed, such a hard worker and such a great team player. I think the team being at this level has really helped her take some of the individual pressure off and just go after her goals. And she’s just been amazing.”
Tuohy proved to be the best runner in the field Saturday, as she has done in every race she has entered this season, but she had plenty of help in leading the Wolfpack to another national championship. Kelsey Chmiel, a junior, finished third, with a time of 19:37.1, and Samantha Bush went from 35th near the 5K-mark of the race to finishing 15th, with a time of 19:57.6.
Nevada Mareno, a senior, finished 29th with a time of 20:07.5. Alabama’s top four runners also finished among the top 25, but the Wolfpack had the best depth of any team in the field. Among the teams vying for the championship, Tuohy and Chmiel were the top two finishers. They’ve been perhaps the best duo in their sport this season.
“We’re super excited right now,” Chmiel said during a phone interview in the moments after crossing the finish line. She and her teammates were still processing the reality that a season-long goal of winning another national title had come to fruition.
“Repeating is something that’s really hard to do,” Chmiel said. “Because not only do you lose people every year, and every year’s different, but there’s just more expectations and more pressure.”
The pressure didn’t seem to faze the Wolfpack. It finished first in all of its meets this season, and won the ACC championship in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month and the NCAA Southeast Regional last week in Louisville. With the victory on Saturday, N.C. State became the first school to repeat as women’s cross country national champions since 2010.
New Mexico, with all five of its runners finishing between 20th and 34th, finished second — 26 points behind N.C. State. Alabama was third and North Carolina — led by Kelsey Harrington, who finished 17th overall with a time of 19:58.8 — placed fifth. In the men’s championship, UNC finished 10th and N.C. State 11th, among 31 teams.
In the moments after her team’s second consecutive national championship, Henes, an N.C. State alum who has coached at the school since 1992, said she wasn’t sure how the Wolfpack would celebrate Saturday. She spoke of the long road to get to this point, the challenges her runners had overcome and how they’d made a habit of “running for each other,” as they did throughout their pursuit of another championship on Saturday.
“These are women who are students of the sport, as well, and so they know that it’s hard to do,” Henes said of repeating as champions. “And just have so much respect for the people who’ve done it before.”
She thought of the last time that N.C. State had accomplished something similar, back in 1979 and ‘80. In those two years, the Wolfpack women won AIAW national championships. The AIAW, at the time, was a national governing body that oversaw women’s college athletics. To repeat again, all these years later, “just means so much to me, personally,” Henes said, “because I’ve been at N.C. State forever.”
This story was originally published November 19, 2022 at 1:15 PM.
