FOR THE FIRST time in 31 years, teammates finished 1-2 in the women’s 800 meters at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. It wasn’t a shocker. The same two Stanford runners placed 1-2 at the 2023 Indoor Championships.
Still only sophomores, Juliette Whittaker and Roisin Willis, friends going back to their days on the national youth track circuit, grabbed the top two places in Eugene, Oregon. They each used a devastating kick. Whittaker took the lead with 80 meters left and extended it to the line, while Willis passed five on the homestretch to emerge from seventh on the final turn.
Whittaker became the first woman to win both the NCAA indoor and outdoor 800 titles in the same year since Oregon’s Raevyn Rogers in 2017. With Willis winning the 2023 indoor title, and with the two combining to win the indoor distance medley relay championship the same year, they have been part of four NCAA titles in two years.
Upperclassmen were the backbone of the team in many ways, such as distance runners Grace Connolly and Lucy Jenks, sprinters Maya Valmon and Cydney Wright, and 400 hurdler Samantha Thomas. However, the youth of the team was in evidence at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. Of the five Stanford women to qualify as individuals, all were freshmen or sophomores.
Alongside the 800-meter stars, Alyssa Jones is at the top of the list. Jones placed third in the long jump at both the NCAA indoor and outdoor championships, after placing fourth and second, respectively, as a freshman.
In both NCAA outdoor championships, Jones led at some point in dramatic competitions.
Jones showed another dimension to her talents during the indoor season when she tried the pentathlon for the first time, and broke the school record, scoring 4,127 points. Jones qualified for the NCAA Championships in the pentathlon, but chose to focus on the long jump and high jump. However, she could focus on the pentathlon at NCAA’s in the future.
In one most remarkable single performances of the year, Amy Bunnage, an 18-year-old freshman, ran 15:11.68 for 5,000 to not only break the Stanford indoor record, but also the Australian under-20 record, including indoors and outdoors. Her time, run on Dempsey Indoor’s 307-meter flat track, was the fourth-fastest in collegiate history for all indoor tracks, including oversized tracks like this one.
Bunnage would complete an outstanding freshman season at the NCAA Outdoor Championships, placing 17th. It closed a year in which she became the first freshman to win the Pac-12 Cross Country Championships in 24 years and was Stanford’s No. 1 runner at the NCAA cross country meet.
Bunnage was not alone in the 5,000 at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. Teammate Sophia Kennedy also was in the race and placed 11th to earn second-team All-America honors. Kennedy’s time of 15:33.29 was a Stanford outdoor freshman record.
With Bunnage and Kennedy, Stanford has had an NCAA women’s outdoor 5,000 finalist 22 times in 23 seasons, including 14 consecutive seasons.
Overall, Stanford crowned nine different women as All-Americans, combining for 17 All-America honors.
As Bunnage crossed the finish line in Eugene, as Stanford’s final athlete in any sport during the 2023-24 academic year, it symbolically ended Stanford’s involvement with the Pac-12 Conference. Stanford track and field first competed under the then-Pacific Coast Conference banner in 1919. Over the years, Pac-12 schools combined to win 106 NCAA men’s and women’s team titles in cross country, and indoor and outdoor track and field.
Now, the Pac-12 era is over, and the Atlantic Coast Conference era begins.