2024 Duke cross country season review
By Vishwa Veeraswamy | January 9, 2025The 2024 Duke cross country campaign showed mixed results, but a promising future, in the first year of new head coach Kevin Jermyn’s time in Durham.
The 2024 Duke cross country campaign showed mixed results, but a promising future, in the first year of new head coach Kevin Jermyn’s time in Durham.
The Blue Devils competed in the NCAA Southeast Regional cross country race Friday for their final race of the 2024 cross country season. The men’s team held its own and finished in an impressive ninth out of 32, while the women’s side consisted of only a couple of runners from the Blue Devils team, and did not place.
Friday, the Blue Devils took to WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, N.C., for the ultimate test: the ACC Championships. The men placed 11th with 345 points and the women took 18th with a total of 549 points.
The men’s team finished at an impressive 5th place out of 18 teams and the women’s team placed 8th out of 14 teams at the invitational in Virginia.
Friday’s races at the Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational marked the first meet in which the Duke men’s and women’s teams both competed, placing 14th on both sides.
Kevin Jermyn, back at Duke after serving as an assistant coach in years past, was leading the team in WakeMed soccer park for just his second meet as head coach.
With the fall sports season underway, The Chronicle is here with a breakdown of every sport, including key rules, terminology, qualifying procedures and more. Up next is a guide to cross country.
2024 will mark the beginning of the Kevin Jermyn era for Duke cross country. With a different coaching regime in place, the team could potentially see a massive leap in success.
Reckart leaves in the wake of a school year characterized by an overwhelming sense of discontentment from athletes, the result of a coaching style rooted in inconsistency and neglect, according to several members of her team.
Shawn Wilbourn, the director of track and field and cross country at Duke, announced Jermyn's hire as the head cross country coach and the track distance coach.
As the bow gets tied on 2023, The Chronicle’s sports department is reviewing the biggest storylines in Duke athletics throughout the year. At No. 8: Amina Maatoug, in her second year with Duke cross country/track and field, improved mightily on an already impressive first season.
Blue Devil runners hail from all over. Yet, without fail, they share the same complaint about Durham in August: Humidity.
On Saturday morning, the Dutch phenom took off on the Panorama Farms Course in Charlottesville, Va., to compete with the cream of the crop in the NCAA Cross Country Championships. She placed ninth — the best finish in Duke program history.
On Friday, the Blue Devils traveled down to Spartanburg, S.C., to face off against more than 30 other teams at Milliken Research Park for the NCAA Southeast Regional Championships. The Duke women finished sixth overall while the men placed seventh.
In an event where even placing top-21 to earn all-ACC honors is a tough feat to accomplish, Maatoug went above and beyond, finishing ahead of all but one of her 143 competitors.
Both Duke cross country teams finished seventh in Tallahassee, Fla. With both the men and women facing multiple top-30 squads, the results were perhaps expected, but nonetheless impressive.
Friday, the Duke women returned to Madison, Wis., for their second run in the Nuttycombe Invitational meet hosted by the Badgers, while the men's team traveled to Charlottesville, Va., for Pre-Nationals.
Now — five broken records later — she takes off on a second season of cross country, looking to build on the foundation she set over the course of the last year. Her mindset for this? “I'll just see what I can do.”
Both Blue Devil teams competed at the Virginia Invitational in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday amid rainy conditions. The women’s squad finished 12th out of 23 teams in the 5k, whereas the men’s team garnered an 18th-place finish in the 8k.
The Blue Devils continued their dominant streak at the Elon Opener Friday night, with the men’s team recording seven top-10 finishes in its 6k race and the women’s team sweeping the top six spots in the 4k.