For a team that had lost some of its most outstanding athletes to graduation, Duke started off the 2011 season with remarkably high goals. Among other things, head coach Norm Ogilvie and his runners looked forward to building on the momentum created by the 2010 team’s success and trying to earn a top-15 finish at the NCAA championship.
Despite these ambitions, however, the season did not go exactly as planned. In addition to the upperclassmen lost to graduation, Duke lost three more of its most experienced runners—James Kostelnik, Clint McKelvey and Mike Moverman—to injury. The attrition forced younger runners to step up and try to fill the vacant spots at high-level meets and, in the end, caused the team to fall short of its high expectations. Looking back though, the Blue Devils are still proud of what they accomplished given the circumstances.
“Anytime you lose four seniors from a top-20 national team you’ll probably characterize it as a rebuilding year,” Ogilvie said. “We had a lot to replace…. We didn’t anticipate getting those guys hurt. I think we did well considering what we had to put out there.”
Despite missing so many of its top runners, Duke was still able to pull off an improved performance at the ACC championship Oct. 29. The previous year, Bo Waggoner led the team to its fifth-place finish as he made history by placing in the top-ten individually for four years in a row. This year, seniors Andrew Brodeur and Stephen Clark managed to lead the team to fourth place overall and make history as well by extending Duke’s streak of top-five finishes for at least one more year. Although he admitted that racing at the national meet would have been a better finish to his Duke career, Brodeur, the team’s frontrunner, was able to leave the season in good spirits.
“We had big shoes to fill… and like the girls’ team we were hampered by injuries,” Brodeur said. “But I ran my fastest times out of all four of the years I was here. I can’t walk away from it terribly disappointed.”
Brodeur also mentioned that one of his personal goals for the season had been serving as a guide for the younger runners on the team, particularly those in the freshman class. The senior listed that goal as something he achieved over the course of the season.
For the new runners, however, the most helpful tool gained was experience. One of the main sources that both Ogilvie and his runners cited as a cause for the team’s inability to live up to its ambitions was the loss of veteran runners from previous seasons. On a positive note, because those runners were not present, more underclassmen were forced to compete at a high level and earn their own experience.
“I feel a little bit disappointed,” freshman Morgan Pearson said. “As a team, we wanted to make nationals and we didn’t. I wish I could do my part a little better. But as an individual I think I learned a lot. It was more experience for me.”
The team hopes this progression in its younger runners will translate into more successful seasons in the coming years. And even though the Blue Devils did not end this year’s season quite where they had hoped, they were still able to walk away satisfied.
“I think it was a good season,” Ogilvie said. “I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. We had a good year. If we have a couple things go differently, we have a great year. We did a lot of good things. We’ll certainly shoot to do better next year, but that’s because every year you shoot to do better.”
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