Running for Fun and Personal Bests: A Season Inside with the North Central College Men’s Cross Country Team
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Part One: The Day Before
Nineteen hours before the 2024 D3 National Championship, a bus full of runners hoping to win it all slides through the late-November darkness. Like many other squads competing in the meet in Terre Haute tomorrow, they are descending on the only Olive Garden in a fifty-mile radius.
The runners aboard the bus have all overdressed for the fast-casual establishment, wearing identical black pants and white shirts. Their red-and-white-striped ties match the uniforms they will wear in the morning. Those barbershop-quartet singlets bear no name, no text, no logo. But every team tomorrow will see those candy stripes and know they belong to the North Central College men’s cross country team.
The seven athletes competing in the morning and the handful of alternates prepared, if necessary, to take their place lounge across the bus’s fifty-five mostly empty seats. Since the season began in August, most of these runners have grown accustomed to running eighty, ninety, a hundred miles a week. Now that they have tapered for Nationals, they do not know what to do with their restless legs. They drape them across the narrow aisle or prop them against the empty seat ahead of them. No one says a word. A growing sense of quiet, dancing between focus and apprehension, hangs in the darkness.
The journey of literally thousands of miles which has brought them to this nervy moment began ninety-nine days earlier. On August 15, 2024, the team gathered for their first meeting of the season, one day before the first official practice. After a long elephant summer of base training, fifty-five runners returned to North Central’s postcard-sized campus, located thirty miles outside of Chicago in Naperville, Illinois.
Fittingly for a team as storied as the Cardinals, they met in the college’s sports museum. A glass-plated exhibit against the far wall celebrates the cross-country program’s runaway success—even as it struggles to keep up with it. Every time the program won another title, the museum curator crudely updated a plaque listing every win by pasting over the total, but they gave up after the team hit sixteen.
That number is still three short, but the failure to remain current is understandable. North Central has won more men’s national titles than any other cross country team in Divisions I, II, or III. Across all sports and every division in the NCAA, only seven individual programs have more national titles. Entire D1 schools known for their athletic brands—including the University of Tennessee, Syracuse, and Texas A&M—have won fewer national championships across all of their sports than the Cardinal’s nineteen in just men’s cross country.
North Central achieved this division-defining success under the stewardship of one man, the long-time head coach, Al Carius. For more than half a century, Al led the team with the enthusiasm of your favorite motivational speaker’s favorite motivational speaker. When he first arrived at North Central in 1966, the program struggled to put even five runners on the starting line. When he retired fifty-four years later, North Central had finished in the top three at Nationals forty-one times. It remains the only team in D3 history to qualify for every single national meet. And in 2000, the governing body of collegiate running named Al Carius D3’s “Coach of the Century.”
After his retirement, the job of filling Al’s massive shoes eventually passed to one of his former athletes. Matt Sinnott is a broad-shouldered forty-something with a spiky crewcut, smile wrinkles, and tattoos covering his tree-trunk legs (he himself says he should have been a long-distance speed-skater). On one leg is an inking of a North Central runner and a recreation of the legendary Japanese woodblock print, The Great Wave. On the other, a phoenix rises from the ashes next to the Japanese symbol for “Big Brother.”
The oldest of six children born to a carpenter and martial arts instructor, Sinnott grew up in nearby North Aurora, graduated from North Central in 2003, taught physics for a decade at his old high school, and returned to his old college as a volunteer coach in 2013. “I’m the poster child for attachment issues,” he grins. After nine years, first as a volunteer coach, then as a paid assistant, Sinnott became the head coach in 2022. And with a clearing of his throat, he officially kickstarts his third season overseeing D3’s most storied team. “The summer is over,” he announces to the fifty-five runners in front of him. “The season has started. Welcome, everyone.”
The smattering of athletes is arrayed on the floor of the museum, stacks of empty pizza boxes leaning precariously in the corner. Sinnott sits in a plastic chair next to a glass display case housing one of the team’s iconic uniforms, a red-and-white candy-striped running singlet. The team has worn these jerseys— the same jerseys—at every national meet since 1968. They represent a core pillar of North Central’s history, a candy-cane thread connecting today’s athletes to those who wore this same fabric decades ago. Sinnott begins his inauguration speech by waving in the air another piece of the team’s connective tissue: a red three-ring binder.
“What is this?” he asks rhetorically, flipping the spine out to his audience to show the year “1970” printed along the side. “This binder is a record of an entire cross country season. All the rosters, workouts, and race results are in here from a single season, fifty-four years ago. There are dozens of these in my office.” He shows them two other binders, one from 1987, another from 2004, and thumbs through the weathered pages. Al had compiled each of them during his decades with the team. “Each of these binders tells a story. A good story, about what that team did and how they did it. It’s a snapshot of memories. This is what they accomplished.”
“But what have we accomplished?” He looks around the room. “Not much. And that’s not a slam; we are on Day One. Our binder is as blank as a piece of paper.” For emphasis, he pulls from one of the binders a blank, white sheet. “You guys have a lot of great memories ahead of you. We’re going to put it all in our binder so that people twenty years from now can pull this season off the shelf and read about what we accomplished.”
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Everyone hopes that when the 2024 binder goes on the shelf, it will tell the story of a team that emerged victoriously from a six-year championship drought. Only once before has North Central gone this long without winning a title—a dreaded ten-year slump the team still refers to as “The Dark Years.” This second downturn began in the COVID-19 pandemic, when D3 did not offer any championships in 2020 and North Central’s best and most experienced runners graduated en masse. At the first Nationals back in 2021, the first since Al’s retirement, the Cardinals placed fifteenth. It was their second-worst performance ever and only the fourth time outside of the top ten. The following year, they finished seventh.
“We had a culture dip during COVID,” Sinnott admits to the team gathered in the museum. “We are trying to bring that expectation back up.”
Recent efforts have proven successful. Last year, in the closest national meet ever contested, North Central took third place. Eleven agonizing points separated them from the 2023 title, a margin so small that if one Cardinal had finished just five seconds faster, they would have won it all. The 2024 team, still smarting from that loss, has prepared better and run more miles this summer than any team since COVID. Everyone in this room dreams of winning the program’s first national championship since 2018. They dream of a redemption story.
But Sinnott offers a caveat, an important one. “We’re not just doing this to win a championship. That’s fun, but that’s not our metric for success. There were some really good guys who have come through in the last five years. They didn’t win a championship. But does that mean they learned nothing about how to be successful?”
Several runners emphatically shake their heads no. “Not at all.” Sinnott insists. “They learned how to develop, how to embrace this life of discipline. They learned how to become something they’ve never been before.”
When you ask anyone on the team or any of their coaches why North Central has been so successful in cross country, they point not to their workout plan or their recruiting operation, but to this notion that the team teaches runners how to be successful in both running and in life. North Central cross country is not just a team, but a lifestyle. Living that lifestyle makes you a better athlete and a better person.
This made up a core tenet of Al’s coaching philosophy, of how he ran the program during his fifty-four year tenure, and of how Sinnott has stewarded the team since. Indeed, in his appropriately titled 2022 book, Run for Fun and Personal Bests: A Recipe for Long-Term Growth and Success, Al wrote that “my purpose as a coach is not about winning, but rather about our student-athletes becoming ‘Winners in Life’ through the physical in the pursuit of success.”
That phrase, “run for fun and personal bests,” distills the philosophy of the North Central program. It appears everywhere: on shirts, on email signatures, and on tiny wallet cards that the athletes carry with them.
It stands in stark contrast to the famous phrase often (and falsely) attributed to Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” As all sport, especially at the college level, drifts towards a cutthroat competition, Al’s philosophy charts a different course. “One of my biggest concerns about the present state of education is witnessing the slow separation between athletics and academics at the collegiate level,” Al critiqued in his book. Athletes are increasingly focused on “what they can ‘get’ monetarily from being an athlete.” Al’s fears only deepened in the early 2020s as Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals have turned big-time college athletics upside down, bringing new money and more attention to the big-name D1 teams.
In the middle of that upheaval, North Central has built a philosophy around fun and personal growth. Like all teams in D3, North Central does not offer athletic scholarships. The program believes that running for pleasure and personal growth are much stronger motivations than money could ever be. Yet the question remains: after one of the most closely contested national meets the year before and in the midst of profound changes in college athletics, will that be enough?
The group gathered in the North Central sport museum in August of 2024 believe the answer is a resolute “yes.” Sinnott agrees. “You guys have a lot of great memories ahead of you,” Sinnott tells them. “And I’m so excited to be a part of it. We have so much to put in our binder. And tomorrow is our first entry.”
Ninety-nine entries later, that group of fifty-five runners gathered in the museum has winnowed down to the seven on the bus traveling to Olive Garden the night before the national championship. Those seven had logged dozens of workouts and hundreds of miles in their 2024 binder. As the charter bus noses into a parking lot Terre Haute, with only the final page in that binder left to be written, Sinnott relaxes into his seat at the front. Only a pasta dinner and a good night’s rest separates the team from the national championship. The roster is set. The hay is in the barn. Tomorrow, they will try to break a six-year curse.
Then a runner walks up the aisle from the back of the bus. “Hey, I just wanted to let the coaches know,” he says. “Somebody just threw up in the bathroom.”
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.