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Sarah Burnell’s boomerang catch

Like a boomerang, Grinnell, Iowa keeps coming back to Sarah Burnell. It’s the place she was raised and became a local running talent, it’s the place she decided to continue her college education and athletics career, and, now, it’s the place she has returned to carry out a career in college coaching. Perhaps no one is better equipped than Burnell for the job, either, as she knows exactly what it takes to succeed at a place like Grinnell, unique for its academic prestige in the heart of rural Iowa.

“The culture here is really curious, really passionate, a little bit adventurous,” Burnell said.

She explained that Grinnell has an open curriculum, giving students a say in which classes they take, and its backdrop in rural Iowa can be intimidating to some. To Burnell, however, the town with a population under 10,000 coined the “Jewel of the Prairie” is home.

“To be able to coach back in my hometown is awesome,” she said. “I get to be close to my family. I have a really strong support network. Grinnell is a small town. So many people here have watched me run through high school and college and support me now as I’m coaching the teams.”

Having been through the program herself from 2010-2014, Burnell graduated with a degree in anthropology and two All-American honors in the outdoor 1500m and indoor mile to her name. She then spent several seasons helping out at Grinnell before moving to Columbus, Ohio where she worked as the Assistant Director of Alumni Relations, volunteered as a Cross Country and Track and Field Assistant Coach, and continued running post-collegiately (having qualified for and competed at the Boston Marathon in both 2016 and 2017).

It was at Otterbein that she was mentored by Coach Dara Ford on how to succeed as a woman in college coaching, something that was becoming more and more appealing to Burnell as a path forward. She eventually entered a graduate program in Exercise and Sport Studies at Smith College, where she accepted a GA position under the mentorship of Coach Ellen O’Neill.

“[O’Neill] had a wealth of knowledge of–not so much how to get into coaching the way that Dara was helping me navigate that, but–the things that she had learned from coaching women for so long and how it’s evolved, the things that we still needed to change, and how I could help support women specifically.”

Photo by Justin Hayworth/Grinnell College

Burnell would eventually apply this knowledge when she took over as Head Women’s and Men’s Cross Country Coach at Grinnell in the summer of 2020. Taking over the program coincided with the global Covid-19 pandemic, which gave her the unique opportunity to rebuild.

“I got [to watch] the team cultures go from feeling a little bit out of place on the starting line for some races,” Burnell said, “to jumping forward five years to now where there’s talk about, ‘yeah, we want to be running at nationals.’”

Though the Grinnell women’s team did not qualify as a team to nationals this year from the highly competitive Midwest region, they posted some head-turning performances. They beat ranked Colby at the mid-season Connecticut College Invitational, won the Midwest Conference title, and placed fifth at regionals, just 57 points shy of a nationals bid. Senior Hannah Roark placed 18th overall, earning her her first trip to nationals.

Burnell explained that the men’s team is also making huge leaps. The young squad took conference runner-up and posted a top-ten finish at Midwest regionals.

“I’m just really proud of them,” Burnell said of both teams. “They’ve always been capable of doing really big things, but seeing [them see] it in themselves that they’re capable of it has been really fun to watch.”

When it comes to coaching her athletes and fostering their growth, Burnell has leaned a lot on her own running experiences to inform how to coach athletes with similar demands for knowledge.

“When I was post-college trying to figure out how to run marathons, I was having to think a lot more and realized how hard it is to coach yourself,” Burnell said. “I work with a lot of students who like to think about their training. They are nerds, they want to understand why. They want to read the books on my bookshelf about exercise physiology and how the body works and trains and adapts.”

Burnell noted that the best practices for effective coaching she has found are to empower her athletes with such knowledge, while also offering an individualized approach and reminding them of the bigger picture. The environment at a place like Grinnell can be stressful with its academic rigor, so she is intentional about empathizing with her student-athletes, something that comes naturally as someone who has gone through the same program.

“Having experienced it helps me challenge them,” Burnell said. “I can set pretty high standards for our program in terms of the amount of dedication and also the expectation they’re going to do really well in school and say, ‘I know it’s hard, but I’ve done it and I know you can do it, too.’”

Moving forward, Burnell hopes to establish a consistent expectation of success.

“I would love to be very consistently winning our conference championship,” she said. “The next step is to get some individuals to nationals, which we did this year on the women’s side, but then the end goal is making sure we have a regular appearance on the national stage.”

Perhaps because she was once one of them, Burnell is excited to be back in Grinnell working with student-athletes who are not just driven and motivated but balanced, recognizing that there is a lot more to life than running. As someone who has been through every iteration of competitive running possible in Grinnell, Burnell’s position on balance carries extra weight.

“I coach because I’m competitive and I want to have fast runners and I want us to do cool things like break records and go to nationals and all that fun stuff,” Burnell said. “But also at the end of the day, coaching has a greater purpose, which is to make sure we have strong, healthy, confident women and men.”

With a boomerang catch in hand, Burnell shows us that sometimes the biggest impact you can make is the one in the community that shaped you, especially during a time when community is becoming increasingly more important.

“My greater purpose is [giving] people a good experience but also [educating] these students who will maybe go on to coach young kids,” Burnell said. “We make sure we ultimately give them the skills and the confidence so when they’re sitting in boardrooms they’re making good decisions about funding, our world, the government. We make sure we make them confident, thoughtful, and kind.”

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