Duals in the Sun

College track teams stoke the flames of historic rivalries.

Friday, April 12, 2013, 12:00 am

The college dual meet, when two track teams go head-to-head, feels like an anachronism. As coaches and athletes chase ever-faster qualifying times for championship races and prioritize late-season individual events, the chance for pure competition between university squads is dwindling.

But not everywhere. Here are eight Division I schools maintaining historic and contentious rivalries in track and field that still bring an unexpected level of adrenaline to competitors and fans alike.


The background: You've seen the clip. A kick returner from Cal streaks through a prematurely celebrating Stanford band on the final play of the teams' 1982 meeting to clinch a win in a last-second effort that would become known as "The Play." The resulting pandemonium is perhaps the single best symbol for the importance of the rivalry to both teams.

Cal and Stanford, located on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay, first met on the football field in 1892. The teams' annual meeting is called "The Big Game." The dual in track, naturally, is called "The Big Meet."

The track version: Distance runners are central figures in all dual meets because of their ability to score points in multiple events. But perhaps no rivalry is as distance-oriented as Cal-Stanford.

Magdalena Lewy Boulet, David Torrence, Alysia Montano and Deborah Maier are only a few of the recent graduates of Berkeley with elite credentials. Stanford's distance royalty runs even deeper: Ryan and Sara Hall, Chris Derrick and Lauren Fleshman are Cardinal alumni competing for U.S. titles in almost any championship race they enter.

Yet they put individual aspirations aside when competing in the dual meet. That day, the only thing that matters is team points. "Our coaches treated that dual meet as if it were one of the biggest meets of the year," says Ryan Hall. "I remember guys doing crazy doubles and triples in order to score more points. My memories are about how dirty the races were, especially in the 1500 and 800. It seemed like elbows were flying everywhere. Running felt more like competing in a boxing match than a race."


The background: Harvard and Yale first met in 1852 in a rowing regatta. More than 150 years later, the rivalry remains central to the athletic departments at both schools. The Ivy League doesn't allow athletic scholarships, so athletes must truly be students first. Nowhere is that more true than at Harvard and Yale, two of the top academic institutions in the country.

The track version: The importance of Harvard-Yale hit Harvard assistant coach Priscilla Bayley immediately upon her arrival in Cambridge in 2011. In Bayley's first Havard-Yale dual in women's cross country, Yale took six of the top seven places. Harvard, meanwhile, would move on from that loss to qualify for the 2012 NCAA championships for the first time since 1983. Bayley traces the turnaround to the Yale meet. "The sting of that defeat was enough for us to kick it into high gear," Bayley says, "and that's very much a part of what got us to nationals."

David Shoehalter, the director of cross country and track and field at Yale, says the meets against Harvard are valuable because they emphasize the team over any individual. "I'm not an old guy, but I'm old-school," he says.

Aside from the usual bragging rights, the Harvard-Yale meet also has repercussions for a combined dual meet against Oxford and Cambridge held every two years. In that meet, Harvard and Yale's best athletes put differences aside and combine to face a similarly united team from England.


The background: USC versus UCLA is unique because both schools are located within Los Angeles city limits, only 13 miles apart. With rich athletic traditions that span numerous sports, athletes make an annual procession from the two universities into professional sports or to the Olympic Games.

The track version: Track talent abounds in southern California, so many student-athletes at the schools have allegiances long before they ever don blue or cardinal singlets. And USC-UCLA has arguably the highest-quality dual meet in track and field. On the men's side, sprinters like Ato Boldon, Mike Marsh, Henry Thomas and Steve Lewis wore UCLA blue; USC set 4×100m relay world records in 1931 and 1967, and it's the only school in the event's history to own the record that is traditionally set by teams made up of the best athletes from entire countries. On the women's side, Gail Devers, Florence Griffith-Joyner and Evelyn Ashford all attended UCLA. Inger Miller, a 1996 Olympian, did her collegiate running at USC.

Today, USC remains sprint-heavy, especially on the men's side, because the Trojans do not field a men's cross country team. UCLA, meanwhile, has a balanced track team and sent a men's team to the NCAA cross country championships in 2012.

Coaches at both schools say that while a runner may sit out an invitational or two based on individualized training, almost every athlete plays a role in the dual meet. Forest Braden, assistant coach in distance events at UCLA, says he never needs to stress the importance of beating USC to his athletes. "There's a couple thousand people in the stands, people in red, people in blue, and you can tell that the intensity has been raised," he says.


The background: Lehigh-Lafayette is the oldest and most-played game in college football; so venerable is the tradition that the meeting between the schools is simply called "The Rivalry." It will see its 150th game contested in 2014 at Yankee Stadium.

The track version: No matter which team is stronger in a given year, the track meet is always bound to be close, says Lehigh head cross country coach Todd Etters, who also ran for the Mountain Hawks. "When there are only six guys lining up to race," he says, "anything can happen."

Neither Lehigh nor Lafayette fields teams that compete on the same level as some of the others in prestigious rivalries, though both schools have had standout athletes over the years. But the history of this rivalry means the schools will forever be linked.

"It's something that's ingrained in them from the time they step on campus, and even before," says Julio Piazza, Lafayette's head cross country and track and field coach. "The rivalry is going to endure. It's institutional."