Part Four: Nationals
Part Four: Nationals
“Hey I just wanted to let the coaches know,” one of the North Central runners tells the coaches seated at the front of the bus, “somebody just threw up in the bathroom.”
Nineteen hours remain until the 2024 National Championship meet. After a ninety-nine-day season, the men’s cross country team had boarded the bus to travel to the Olive Garden in Terre Haute, Indiana for their final meal before the race. Now no one’s very hungry.
The door to the bathroom is propped open, bathing the back of the bus in pale, yellow light. Inside, fifth-year Clark Kelly has fallen to his knees, keeled over on top of the toilet.
Everyone but the coaches disembarks and wanders inside. Clark shuffles up from the back. “How are you feeling?” asks head coach Matt Sinnott.
“I just want to brush my teeth.”
Assistant coach Dale Koepnick takes Clark to a dollar store to buy a toothbrush, but the mood inside the Olive Garden craters. North Central eats at Olive Garden the night before every race and has developed a half dozen traditions, from a breadstick-eating competition to pretending it is faculty mentor Pat Gray’s birthday so they can convince the whole restaurant to sing for him. Now a pall falls over the team. Everyone asks themselves: “Is Clark ok?” followed by “Is it contagious?” and finally, “Can he race tomorrow?”
Ironically, the person least worried about the situation is Clark, who returns from the bathroom with his toothbrush and a smile. All dinner, he cracks jokes with his teammates. But every twenty minutes, he excuses himself to the restroom and comes back wiping his chin.
Sinnott does not decide on next steps until the team returns to the hotel afterwards. North Central always travels with multiple alternates who could jump in at any time. The next alternate up is a junior named Kyle Nofziger, nicknamed Badger. But Sinnott does not take lightly the idea of pulling a fifth-year senior. For years, Clark has dreamed of representing North Central in the biggest race of the year. How can he possibly yank that away?
In a low-voiced conversation in Clark’s dimly lit hotel room, coach and athlete talk to one another. “It’s an incredibly close decision.” Sinnott says over the low hum of the window AC unit.
“Yeah,” Clark says. “I know.”
“You’ve been rock solid all season. You’ve earned your spot. We believe in you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But Badger at 100% is a safer bet than you are 90%.”
“Yeah,” Clark sighs. “I know.”
*****
“Clark did nothing wrong,” assistant coach Tim Hird mourns after the eleventh-hour lineup switch. “He worked his ass off. He just got dealt a shit hand of cards. It’s unfair. But that’s life. It sucks.”
“It sucks” is the general team consensus the next morning as the team boards the bus for the meet. Despite the tumultuous evening before, the athletes seem unaffected by it as they stoically board the bus. The meet they have spent months preparing for is in five hours.
“I’m learning to manage my apprehension for this day,” says Tim Hird’s brother, Zach, who serves as a volunteer assistant for the team. Zach himself had been a member of three national title teams in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Each of those years, North Central arrived at Nationals with The Knowing that they would win. Since the pandemic, however, that confidence has waned. “Part of that,” Zach reflects, “is for a few years there, I felt like I wanted it more than they did.”
Tim watches the team as they board the bus for the National meet. “They definitely want it today,” is all he says in response.
At last, a hundred days after that first meeting in the campus athletics museum, North Central arrives at the 2024 D3 Cross Country National Championships.
It is a bog standard November day in Terre Haute: thirty-five degrees, the sky covered in an endless bank of low-hanging gray clouds. Snow flurries two days ago have left the ground soft and muddy. From the sky to the bare trees to the country roads surrounding the course, it is a gray, gray day.
On the ride over, Emerald Svienty, North Central’s top runner, had regaled the team with a dramatic reading of D3 Glory Days’ race preview. It named the University of Wisconsin (UW) La Crosse as the favorites to win the 2024 title, and for good reason. They had finished second the year before by only one point and topped he rankings every week this season. Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa has clung onto the number two spot since August. North Central narrowly lost to the Knights at Regionals the week before, but only by four points. “Momentum is on the Cardinals’ side,” D3 Glory Days concluded, “If they can keep that spread or even trim it down while having Svienty and Sorg do their thing up front, the legendary program can see themselves back atop the podium.”
Now those three teams in the hunt and twenty-nine others finish their final strides from the starting line. Almost every one of North Central’s fifty-five runners who are not racing, plus dozens more parents and alumni, line the fenced-in starting area. “Look around,” Sinnott told the runners in the final huddle of the season. “Look at each other. Look at who’s in this circle. Look who’s on the course cheering for you. Look at The Stripes. All those people, all that history. That’s what you’re running for today.”
There is nothing else to say. The moment has arrived. They stack their hands into the circle. “This is that feeling that we’ve been talking about all year,” Sinnott yells. “This is that 1-2-3 TEAM!”
The circle breaks. Each racer hugs each of the coaches and each of the alternates, then strides back to the starting line. At the cry of the starter’s whistle, seven runners in Stripes snap to attention. The end of the 2024 season has begun.
The gun fires. 294 athletes barrel into the open field. Sixth-year senior Matt Jett dives into the breach, running tall, with Badger on his coattails. As the field collapses in around them, Badger, who learned he would be in this race only fourteen hours earlier, looks up and realizes he ran himself into the lead pack. Doubt crashes in. “What are you doing here?” he asks himself. “What are you doing here?”
The field floods downhill and hits a sharp right turn. Fighting for the inside tangent becomes a blood sport. Wartburg’s Isaiah Hammerand seizes the lead, joined by two of his teammates in the top ten. They hit the first kilometer in 2:39. All but one runner in the field came through on pace to break the national meet record. Five seconds separate first place from 101st.
Coaches Tim and Zach Hird bounce around the course, following the massive crowds of rabid fans that pack the sidelines three-deep. Zach refreshes the live results on his phone. A quarter of the way into the race, La Crosse has already nabbed the top spot. Wartburg finds themselves in fourth. The North Central logo shuffles between seventh and tenth place. “Seventh is great considering how fast it was,” Tim soothes. “We can move up from this.” The field storms past, and he darts to the next viewing window.
The field finishes the first of two laps. At the front, running eleven-people wide, is a who’s who of D3 cross country. Three of those runners hail from UW La Crosse, including both Matthai twins, Aidan and Grant. Behind them lurks the mustachioed Christian Patzka, the 5K and steeplechase national champion from the previous track season.
The pack hits the 5K mark in 15:17, with Emerald only two seconds behind. A few seconds back, Matt Jett surges past his teammates BJ Sorg and Johnny Olenek. He taps them on the shoulder, letting him know his presence in the churn of runners. “He tried to get me to go with him,” Johnny said later, “but I just couldn’t.”
On the sidelines, forty North Central athletes in red beanies and candy-cane striped overalls chant “N-C-C! N-C-C!” Dozens more alums from every decade dart around the course to encourage the seven.
Everyone is in agony as the second lap ends. BJ feels like he has been kicking since the three-mile mark. Senior Luke Hoffmann slams into a puddle and feels his hamstring give out. At the front, Christian Patzka pulls away from the rest of the field, points his finger in the air, and breaks the tape in 24:01.
Behind him, a crush of runners hit what D3 Glory Days called “one of the longest finishing straights in cross country.” Emerald thunders down the almost half mile-long straightaway as North Central’s first runner. “It was just a dogfight,” they recall after finishing in tenth place. “I’m more proud of my result this year than last year. Yeah I was third last year and you’d like to see that progress. But this was the hardest race I’ve ever been in.”
Another reason for pride in tenth place, which Emerald only revealed to the coaches on the bus ride back, is they’ve been running on a torn labrum and a stress fracture since September. “I didn’t want anyone to question what I’ve been doing and am able to do.”
Behind Emerald, the rest of The Stripes rush in. Matt Jett finishes in thirty-second to claim his first All-American honors. BJ’s mantra of “I have to do everything I can for the team” leads him to finish in 25:01. Johnny trails by only two seconds, finishing in eighty-second.
Photo by Dominick Gramarosso
The seven runners stagger into the finishing chute, a fence-lined tunnel beneath a set of grandstands. They slump against one of the fences, collecting themselves. BJ scales the top to get a better view of the screen displaying the live results. He reaches the top and freezes.
“We got seventh?”
La Crosse gave a dominant performance, winning with only seventy-seven points. Wartburg takes runner-up honors with 173. Then come Pomona Pitzer, UW Whitewater, NYU, SUNY Geneseo, and then North Central. The Cardinals were ranked fourth going into the race and had hopes to win it all. Seventh is the fifth-worst performance in program history.
BJ drops to the ground. His fingers still laced between the chain-link, he lays prone, face down, like he is praying. He sobs. Owen Christy, one of the alternates, finds him from the other side of the fence. Owen pokes his fingers through the chain-link, grabbing BJ’s hands. They say nothing. Eventually, Emerald helps BJ up, and they shuffle off through the exit.
Owen is left on the other side of the fence, alone. His eyes waver with tears, and his face has gone red and puffy. Zach Hird finds him and gives him a hug. “Remember this feeling,” the volunteer coach and North Central alum says, hands on Owen’s shoulders. “The best thing that ever happened to my team was getting 5th in 2015. It burns. It never goes away. But we wouldn’t have won three in a row without that.”
The coaches wait by the abandoned start line, processing. The totality of the loss, the gap between hopeful expectation and crushing reality, makes it hard to evaluate what went wrong. Tim tries anyway. “Second was right there. Podium was right there. We didn’t have a bad day. Matt Jett All-American, Emerald top ten, nobody blew up. It just wasn’t a good day.” Sinnott stares at the ground, hands clasped behind his back.
Eventually, The Seven stumble over. Sinnott hugs each of them. A circle of silent North Central spectators builds around them. BJ still has tears in his eyes. His mom steps out of the crowd and gives him a hug. His dad and little brother, who wears a full-body Cardinal outfit, join the embrace. They hug for a long time. At last, BJ stops tremoring.
The Seven finds it within themselves to cool down, while the rest of the coaches and spectators amble off to the awards ceremony. They watch as Wartburg comes forward to celebrate as runners-up, and as La Crosse hoists the 2024 National Championship trophy.
The North Central contingent stares blankly at the stage as the awards unfold. They clap for Wartburg and La Crosse. They try to burn the memory of those teams celebrating into their minds. They want to be up there themselves. And no one in that crowd wants to feel this way again.
*****
Two days later, the team gathers one final time before track season. They meet at their usual practice time, but everyone arrives in street clothes. “It feels kind of weird doing this when we don’t have practice right after,” Sinnott observes, standing at the front of a classroom back on campus. “But this is a good time for us to get together one last time and reflect.”
“The elephant in the room is that that wasn’t the outcome that we expected and that we have been prepping for.” Everyone in the room knows this. Still, it is nice to hear Sinnott say it aloud. “That’s life sometimes. It doesn’t seem fair that you’re doing everything right and you’re not seeing the outcome or results that you think you should have. The seven guys who ran didn’t give up anything. They were fighting. It just wasn’t a great day.”
“But what a great day for life!” Sinnott insists. “One of our objectives with this program is learning lessons that will make you successful in running and life. Sometimes it doesn’t go the way we expect. Winning doesn’t automatically mean it was a great team. Getting seventh does not automatically mean it was a failure.”
An oft-repeated quote from North Central’s long-time head coach, Al Carius, is that “You can lose in winning, and you can win in losing.” Now, the man himself, who has sat off to the side of Sinnott the entire meeting, rises. Since retiring as head coach in 2020 amid a battle with Stage Four bone cancer, Al has not regularly come to practice. But he came today to minister to his team once more.
He recalls a Monday quite like this one, years earlier, after his team had won a national championship. “When the season was over, I took the team up to the classroom in Merner Fieldhouse,” Al begins. “And I told them that, to the outside world, you’re national champions. And you’re successful. But I wanted them to know, from the bottom of my heart, that they were not a great team. We became very individualistic. We did not focus on what was eternal when it comes to being a great team. We just happened to have more talent than everyone else.”
“That’s the fundamental values that this program is all about,” Al insists. “It’s about who you become in the process. Those values are not changeable! They’re eternal. They help you be a better person.”
“And I think…no, I’m going to shut up.” Al looks down, pauses for a moment, then looks back up at the fifty-five runners before him. “I think in a lot of ways, athletics across the nation has lost its soul.”
“It’s become too much about JUST performance. JUST outcome. JUST money. Rather than what’s fundamentally most important about the whole experience. And what you had going for you this entire year is what’s going to stick with you: the friendships, the values. So I want to congratulate you on a GREAT season, a GREAT year, a GREAT team, and all the fundamental values you’ve absorbed that I promise you, on a stack of Bibles, will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
Every runner in the room looks at Al. And they nod. They would all probably admit that these are the sentiments you only hear when you lose. But if those lessons would be taken seriously anywhere, it would be at North Central. It would be in Division 3.
For the 2024 national championship would be the final one with Al Carius still serving as his team’s spiritual leader. On September 9, 2025, the long-time head coach passed away at the age of 83. Twelve days later, the school held a Celebration of Life service to honor the man who began coaching at North Central in 1966. Hundreds of people gathered in the basketball arena to honor him.
Speaker after speaker praised Al and the impact he had on the college, on the team, and on their own lives. “It will be hard to name another figure who has had as large an impact on North Central College,” said president Abiódún Gòkè-Paríolá. “This place was my dad’s second home,” remembered Al’s son, Brent. “He considered every one of you to be a part of his family and truly believed that we are a product of every person we encounter.” Frank Gramarosso, who served alongside Al for over forty years as assistant cross country coach and head track and field coach repeated one of his best friend’s favorite sayings. “If all you see is what you see, you will never see all there is to be seen.”
As the crowd of hundreds milled about the basketball arena, a video of Al from eleven years earlier played on the jumbotron. In it, Al gives a speech on the mission of not just North Central cross country, but of all of Division III athletics. “I think it is critically important while you’re in college, for all of us, to really learn who we are,” he concluded. It was a repetition of a lesson he had given hundreds of times, and which the 2024 team learned despite the disappointing finish. “Maximizing our God-given abilities, mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, is what success is all about. It’s not how you measure against anybody else. You’re not competing against anybody else. You are ultimately competing on this earth with yourself to be the best you can be.”
Cam Mallett is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as captain of his D3 cross country team at Berry College in Rome, Georgia before receiving his PhD from Penn State. He talks about running and sports history on his TikTok page, Footnotes With Cam.
Photos: Dominick Gramarosso is a Graduate Assistant for Men’s Cross Country and Track & Field at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. A long time member of the program, his love for the program is embedded to his work as a photographer, a writer, and a coach. You can find his work on Instagram at domg.photos.