The end of the road has come for one of college cross country's titans
Mark Wetmore built a dynasty at Colorado, but this most recent season was his last. He leaves behind a decorated and occasionally controversial tenure
Before we get going, a quick update to a newsletter from last month.
I had the pleasure in early June of detailing Jon Rothstein’s habit of tweeting about college basketball minutiae during major national and international events and, folks, I’m here to say he has struck again.
In the middle of last Thursday’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that drew in more than 50 million viewers – and ignited a heated and panicked conversation about whether a visibly deteriorated Biden should remain in the race – Rothstein tweeted THREE times about non-conference scheduling updates for the upcoming 2024-25 season. For those interested, Georgetown will be hosting Fairfield Nov. 9, Northwestern will host Eastern Illinois on Nov. 15 and San Diego State will welcome UC San Diego on a yet-to-be-specified date.
It’s clearly a bit, but let’s not nitpick Picasso’s brushstrokes as he’s painting.
On to the latest newsletter…
Over the past several years, there has been a string of high-profile coaching exits from college athletics’ major-revenue sports, to the point where some have labeled it an epidemic.
In January, legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban retired after 17 years at the school. Men’s basketball luminaries like Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jay Wright and Jim Boeheim have all stepped aside since 2021 (Bob Huggins did, too, but he didn’t have much of a choice). Tara VanDerveer, C. Vivian Stringer, Muffet McGraw and Lisa Bluder, four of the 11 winningest coaches in women’s college basketball history at any level, have all left their posts since 2020 (if you go back a year, Sylvia Hatchell at North Carolina did, too, but, like Huggins, she didn’t have a ton of say in the matter).
Though it came in a sport that receives a small fraction of the fanfare and attention any of its aforementioned counterparts do, there was another seismic coaching change in the world of Division I athletics late last month.
On June 25, Colorado and athletic director Rick George announced that longtime Buffaloes cross country coach Mark Wetmore would not have his contract renewed for the 2024-25 season.
For whatever he lacks in national fanfare and broader mainstream appeal, Wetmore has been one of the singular figures in the world of college distance running since being hired as the sixth cross country coach in Colorado program history in Nov. 1995. Generally speaking, what Saban was to college football and what Krzyzewski was to college basketball is roughly what Wetmore was to cross country.
Wetmore’s Buffs teams collected eight cross country championships during his tenure – five men’s titles and three women’s – and had five individual NCAA cross country champions. Colorado was the dominant force in men’s cross country in the 2000s, winning five titles between 2001-14. In 2004, it became the fourth and, to this point, final cross country program to win men’s and women’s national championships in the same year. For his efforts, he was named the NCAA coach of the year six times.
In the 2016 Summer Olympics, two of Wetmore’s former Colorado runners who he was still coaching at the time they competed in Rio de Janeiro – Jenny Simpson and Emma Coburn became the first American women to win medals in their respective events, with Simpson claiming the bronze in the 1,500 meters and Coburn doing the same in the steeplechase.
The accomplishments of Wetmore’s cross country fiefdom greatly overshadowed all other programs at Colorado. During his time leading the Buffs, his teams won 39 team conference titles. All of the other teams at Colorado combined for five during that span.
While it was far from a distance-running powerhouse before his arrival in Boulder in 1992 as an assistant coach, Colorado was well-positioned to excel in cross country. The nearby Rocky Mountains provide ample, scenic and challenging trails. The U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs is less than 100 miles away. The thin air at a campus a mile above sea level offers an ideal training setting (even elite athletes like NBA players complain about how quickly they get winded when playing games in Denver). Some of the social and cultural factors that might place a firm ceiling on recruiting high-level prospects to Colorado in the major-revenue sports – namely, that it’s an overwhelmingly white school in an even more overwhelmingly white town – aren’t much of a factor in cross country, if they even are at all.
Still, Wetmore, through his vision and planning, was able to unlock the Buffs’ potential in a way it hadn’t been previously. And, because of that, he thrived.
As is so often the case, the frequency of those achievements waned in his final years at the school, which made a once-unthinkable move a reality.
Since 2014, Colorado has just one team national title (the women’s team in 2018) and Dani Jones’ individual championship in 2018 remains the Buffs’ only one since 2003. Last fall, the women finished 19th and the men 25th at the NCAA championships, several steps below where the programs had been throughout virtually the entire Wetmore era.
In February, Wetmore had met with George to discuss the status of his contract, which was set to expire at the end of the season and had prompted questions from anxious recruits. He soon saw the proverbial writing on the wall.
“He told me then that he wasn’t prepared to make a decision,” Wetmore said to the Boulder Daily Camera. “By the middle of February, I was pretty sure that the athletic administration wanted to, as they say, go in another direction.”
There were other, more insidious factors that preceded Wetmore’s ouster and perhaps set the stage for it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Front Porch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.