The Case of the Disappearing Talent

Why are we losing so much female talent in the US Collegiate system?

When Whitney Anderson began working out with Lyle Knudson in Breckenridge, Colorado, in early 2004, she was a skinny transplant from Alaska whose only prior training had been jogging on a bush-plane airstrip. By the time she went off to Duke on a full scholarship two years later, she had taken fourth at the Foot Locker National Championship cross country meet and was among the top recruits in America. She followed that up by winning ACC Freshman of the Year honors as the only non-senior on the No. 1-ranked Blue Devils’ starting seven. People began whispering her name as a possible Olympian.

The only problem with Anderson’s unfathomable ascent was the twinge in her hamstring. With Knudson, she had run 35 to 37 miles a week at fast paces. At Duke she was running 55 miles a week, much of it slower than she was used to, and repeating a number of odd drills that bothered her knees. When she did do speed work, the intervals were run under intense scrutiny, timed to the hundredth of a second.

It didn’t take long for Anderson’s body to break down. The slight hamstring tear turned into a sharp, chronic pain and destroyed her stride. Feeling constant pressure from coach Kevin Jermyn to continue running and thereby honor her scholarship, Anderson grew clinically depressed. Within a year she had given up running and become the team manager. When even that grew to be too emotionally draining, Anderson voluntarily ceded her scholarship and began raising money to pay the $40,000-a-year tuition on her own. Halfway through her senior year, she withdrew from school, electing to fulfill her final credits elsewhere.

Anderson’s stunning plummet is hardly unheard of in women’s college running, a trend Knudson has been lamenting for decades. “The girls, it’s an epidemic,” he says. “We’re just ruining all this great talent.”

The problem is nothing new; most running insiders have been privy to it for decades. Tom Heinonen, an eight-time Pac-10 coach of the year at Oregon who retired in 2003, grew so wary of the tendency for high school stars to wilt in college that in the early 1980s he began tracking every Foot Locker National Championship competitor and recording what they did as collegians. Their success rate, he said, was “abysmal—nowhere near what an uninformed observer would expect.”

Knudson has long maintained the problem exists because college coaches, lacking the knowledge needed to design effective training programs, travel in packs and make ego-driven decisions with regard to mileage. “In high school, the coaches tend to be more individualistic. It’s not as much of a social thing,” Knudson said. “In college, the coaches go to meets and sit around and talk: ‘Well, how many miles do your kids run?’ And if the other guy’s kids are running 70 miles, then your kids have to run 75.”

Anderson confirmed this mentality: “Even when I was doing well my freshman year, my coach told me I could do better if I was doing more miles.”

Interviews with a number of high-profile college coaches as well as multiple blue-chip female recruits who have floundered in college yielded one overwhelming fact: Nobody likes talking about this. The coaches, for obvious reasons; the athletes, because they fear “getting kicked off the team,” as one current runner at a top-10 program put it.

That runner, a senior who won multiple state titles in high school and requested anonymity in this story, turned down three full scholarship offers from touted programs and accepted a half-scholarship to her current school instead, because she was promised her training would be individualized, she said. Instead, she missed most of her first three years with injuries she said were caused by having to double her high school mileage to train with the rest of the team. After battling her coach to the point of depression, she finally cut her volume and increased her speed work behind her coach’s back this past fall. She proceeded to run injury free and shave three minutes off her times of the previous season.

“Every time I tried to do everything he gave me, I got hurt,” she said. “So I had to adjust things on my own. I haven’t really told any of my teammates either, because we’ve got some snitches. I hate that I have to do that, but it’s my senior year and I’m sick of being hurt.”

She added: “I can think of one girl in my senior class who hasn’t had an injury in her career, but she was high mileage in high school. And we have a large class—it started at 14 girls, but now we’re down to six or seven.”


Many argue the problem runs deeper than ill-conceived training. For starters, some girls still haven’t hit puberty by the time they get to college, meaning that when they do, they could lose their stride as well as their speed. That is one reason many schools only guarantee the first two years of a scholarship.

It’s also a contributing factor to the strange practices found among elite college recruiters. A former coach at one of America’s premier college programs disclosed his blueprint in blunt terms after requesting anonymity: “If she was a saladian, meaning she only ate salad, I would stop recruiting her,” he said. “If she didn’t have the spread in the hips from puberty, I’d stop recruiting her. Also, if she didn’t have a boyfriend, I viewed her as suspect.”

Lance Harter, a college head coach for 28 years and four-time national coach of the year at Arkansas, said he has only signed a dozen Foot Locker national competitors in his career. Instead, he seeks out “the late bloomer, the young and the hungry,” and mines proven high school programs.

Heinonen, meanwhile, said he wanted “somebody who was good but not necessarily the best; one who maybe didn’t run a ton of mileage; who maybe had more than one coach as they grew up; who came from small schools, ran in bad weather, had a young career. You’re looking for somebody with fire in her eyes.”

Heinonen also weighed his girls every week to help detect eating disorders, a common problem with college runners. But not everyone takes such precautions. In fact, the aforementioned senior who cut her mileage behind her coach’s back, said her coach once looked past an obvious case of anorexia because the runner was performing well.

Knudson, for his part, continues to maintain that the overall problem—hotshot female runners vanishing once they get to college—wouldn’t be nearly as pronounced if those with influence on the national coaching community took more initiative to ensure safe, responsible training.

“Everyone is aware there’s a problem,” he said, “but nobody is willing to address it.”

He believes only a handful of college coaches recognize their role as belonging to a greater purpose; that is, preparing young distance runners to succeed on the international level, where the U.S. has struggled in recent years. If more coaches embraced such a big-picture view, Knudson said, they would be much more cautious with how they handled each runner’s training.

Preventable or not, the issue itself illuminates one underlying point Heinonen constantly took into account during his 27 years at Oregon. “Girls,” he said, “will do what you tell them to do. The only thing is, you better be right.”