“Gung-ho!” The 2021 St. Lawrence Women’s Cross Country team shouts as they’re circled up on the starting line of the cross country course at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY. Their left hands are reaching out to the middle of the circle. About 30 minutes later they would win the Liberty League Championship as a team for the first time since 2018.
The meaning of gung-ho is to be unthinkingly enthusiastic or eager, especially when taking part in fight- ing or warfare. In the case of the 2008 St. Lawrence Women’s Cross Country team, the battlefield was a cross country course, and the fighting was running. Mike Howard, the head coach at the time, wanted the team to have a slogan that would bring forth a competitive fire that had been lacking on the course. To this day, gung-ho is still cheered by the women’s team in the team huddle before every race.
When Howard first became head coach a couple years after he grad- uated from St. Lawrence in 1987 the women’s cross country team didn’t exist. Instead, there was a club run- ning team composed of runners and Nordic skiers with varying lev- els of dedication and commitment to training. In 1991 two women were given the opportunity to race at the NCAA Regional Championships.
As the first Saints to compete at that level, Claire Bourquin and Karen Moran were the trailblazers of the women’s cross country team.
The next year, St. Lawrence had a full team of cross country runners. As the women’s team developed, so did the cross country and track and field facilities. It was difficult to recruit athletes for the first couple of years and the team didn’t do very well because a lot of the women that wanted to run in college wanted to run year-round and that wasn’t an option at that point.
It took some time, but about two years after the women’s cross country team was created, the coaches got the go ahead to start building a women’s track and field program. What was once just the Leithead Fieldhouse and a cinder track outside eventually became the Merrick Pinkard Outdoor Track Complex and then later the Newell Fieldhouse.
“We knew we needed better facilities if we wanted to attract better runners,” said Howard.
During this programmatic building phase, Howard stepped in a new direction to become the director of the cross country and track pro- grams and focus on the construction of new facilities but remained heavily involved with the teams. He gave the reins of the men’s and women’s cross country teams to John Newman and Lyndaker respectively, who both ran very well for St. Lawrence under Howard as head coach.
Lydaker had become the first All-American woman for the St. Lawrence Cross Country team in the 1995 season. The year after, she went on to become one of the first All-American women for the indoor track program as well.
“I think what happened early on for the women was feeding off the men’s history and feeding off the program being a combined program,” said former team member and head coach Deb Lyndaker. “I think there was a sense of if the men are really good, then the women want to be really good. You want to rise up together in that combined sense,” she continued.
The first year the women qualified for the NCAA Championships it was a huge deal. It was out in Spokane, Wash. so it was this major trek across country. The men had done that multiple times and the women’s team was trying to catch up to them.
“Once we got [to NCAAs] for a couple years it became the women going every year and the men not going, but it was always the most exciting when both programs were at the highest level together,” said Lyndaker. “That’s what we were always really focused on.”
“In track we were breaking school records all over the place, almost weekly,” said Lyndaker. “There was a group of us building the program and getting faster, but to get to the national stage at that point was super exciting.”
Lyndaker moved into the head coach position when she was only a few years older that her team members. At first, she learned the ins and outs of field events and then transitioned fully into distance training.
“[Newman and I] were just so invested in the program and in having been a part of building the pro- gram up, just loved the university and we were both hometown people,” said Lyndaker. “Howard just knew that we were very invested in it, so it was easy to all get on board and keep building it up together. I think I always knew that I wanted to coach. I just absolutely loved every bit of the sport and was always dissecting it and looking at statistics.”
Lyndaker was the head coach of the women’s team until 2008 when she decided to step down to spend time with her family and Howard stepped back into the position.
“When I came back, I remember very clearly going in and talking to the women’s team in April, a couple months before I would start again as the cross country coach,” said Howard. “I said to the team, well, we’re going to make Nationals next year. They looked at me like I had four heads.”
The 2008 team did, in fact, make Nationals by a slim margin. They finished further back in the pack as clement weather postponed it until today.
“I learned that if you have one or two runners that are willing to put in the time, train hard, and start to achieve really good things individually, nine out of ten times the rest of the team comes around very quickly behind them,” said Howard. “They start to realize that if their teammate can run really fast and they train with them all the time, that they can do it too.”
One of these runners was Wendy Pavlus, who was the NCAA individual Champion in 2009 and 2010. She led the team to having three All-American finishers and putting four runners in the top 40 of the 2009 NCAA Championship. The momentum from this success has carried the team to numerous NCAA championships, All-Americans, and individual regional and national qualifiers. Over the past thirty years the team has grown tremendously in both numbers and successes. “The program doesn’t have a long history but has had a lot of success in a short period of time,” said Howard.