The Washington and Lee Women’s Cross Country team had its best season since 2019 last year. The team is looking to build on its success and chase down a national title in 2025.
The team is coming off a season where they won the Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC) Championship, the South Regional and earned a national championship bid, something they had not achieved for six years.
“It was a group of people that really believed in one another and what they were capable of. Having five seniors in the top eight and watching the progress over the four years,” said Head Coach Michael Dager. “Their high school numbers weren’t anything like the people they finished around and they took a lot of pride in working hard and accomplishing a lot.”
The team is embodying a new culture and identity this year, bringing in a class of 11 first years and reestablishing who their top seven runners may be. Olivia Warr, ’28, a key piece to the team’s 2024 success, sees the positives of such a big change.
“There has been a buzz. Whether that’s due to the excitement of the freshmen’s first experience running in college or just the anticipation of a new season to come is unclear,” said Warr. “But this infectious buzz is exciting and unites us all in both the pursuit of higher goals and collaboration to work together and achieve them.”
This “buzz” has already led to early season success. The Generals won their first event of the year at the Eagle Cross Country Challenge hosted by Bridgewater College, on the same course that will stage the ODAC Championship later this fall.
After this win the team traveled to Blacksburg to compete in the Virginia Tech Invitational. The team finished in third place behind Radford and Virginia Tech as the only Division III school in the field. Warr set the pace for the Generals, winning the Women’s 4K event with a time of 13:42.
“I think we just try to keep everything in perspective,” said Dagar. “We’re just kind of focused on staying healthy and just putting good race strategies together and implementing them, so that we’re able to do it when it really counts at the end of the year.”
While the results so far speak to the strength of the team, Dagar’s focus is set on being the best they can be every single day.
“To build off that momentum [of the 2024 season] we continue to value that consistency and focus,” said Warr, “which means taking the 22 hours outside of practice seriously, valuing ourselves as individuals who are each essential members of the team, and being intuitive with training weeks with emphasis on longevity.”
The team will continue to focus on their day-to-day training before they head to Dickinson College and Lehigh University for a pair of meets in the next two weeks to continue to find their stride before the ODAC Championships on Nov. 1.
The 2024 campaign proved that the Generals can compete with anybody, and the first two events of this season only reaffirmed that. While the Generals may have many new faces on the team, the goal remains the same: to work hard everyday and let the results come to them.
