Program History
Notable Alumni
Barely a year removed from campus, Lawrence won a grueling 6½-mile cross country race held by the Yonkers YMCA to select New York's Metropolitan Cross Country Team — running down a 3½-minute handicap and beating the next-closest finisher by nearly seven minutes. It's one of the earliest individually notable athletic feats on record for a Stevens man.
A well-traveled all-around athlete — varsity letters in football, baseball, and track at his Detroit high school, then a stint at first base for the Great Lakes Naval Training Station team during his Navy service — Meidell landed at Stevens by way of the University of Detroit and made an immediate mark in track. In 1947 he qualified for the Penn Relays' broad jump, representing Stevens against national powers like Illinois (the defending national champion), Michigan, Army, and Navy, backed by a personal-best jump of 28 feet set while still in uniform.
Before he became the winningest coach in program history, Alonso was the runner who got cross country to varsity status in the first place — racing for the club team as a freshman in 1979, then co-founding the push from club to varsity, then repeatedly breaking his own course record at Van Cortlandt Park. He was named Stevens Athlete of the Week in 1982 for leading the team to the IAC Championship as a senior, capping a college career defined by exactly the doggedness he'd later demand from the runners he coached: at one league meet he finished fourteenth, three minutes off his normal pace, having lost eight pounds to a stomach virus in the three days beforehand.
A transfer from Rochester Institute of Technology who trained 55 to 70 miles a week, Kropac became Stevens' first-ever "Athlete of the Season" in 1996 by spending his career erasing records set by his own coach — running the Van Cortlandt Park cross country course a full second faster than Al Alonso's old mark, and stacking up Stevens records in the 800m, 1500m, 3000m, 5000m, and steeplechase along the way. He qualified for NCAA Regionals in both cross country and track before graduating.
Kainer swept the men's sprint records during his four years at Stevens and still holds every one of them: the school record in the 60m, 100m, and 200m, indoors and out — a clean sweep of the sprint program that's gone unmatched since he graduated.
View athlete profile →Stevens' most decorated recent record-holder, Mathews still holds the school record in eight different events spanning sprints, hurdles, jumps, and both multi-events — the 60m, 100m, 200m, 60m and 100m hurdles, long jump, heptathlon, and pentathlon. Her heptathlon mark of 4,906 points, set in 2024, caps a run of records that touched nearly every discipline on the track.
View athlete profile →Head Coaches
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
Kolibab took over the cross country and track & field programs in 2022.
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
Harden took over the cross country and track & field programs in 2018.
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
Wood took over the cross country and track & field programs in 2012.
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
Crawford took over the cross country and track & field programs in 2004.
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
McGinn took over the cross country and track & field programs in 2003, following the long tenure of Al Alonso.
Head Coach, Cross Country & Track and Field
The program's longest-tenured coach by far, Alonso took over cross country in 1984 — just a year after graduating from Stevens himself, where he'd been the driving force behind getting the sport promoted to varsity and had led the team to an IAC title in 1982. He added the head track job by January 1994 at the latest (a student sign-up flyer that winter lists him running both the indoor and spring track teams out of the Phys. Ed. Department), and in 1995 coached Stevens' first-ever full women's track & field team, a season that earned the program NCAA All-American recognition. He was still coaching as of the archive's final batch in 2000, by then working alongside assistant coach Tom Zapata.
Head Coach, Cross Country
When Stevens elevated cross country to a full varsity sport in 1981 — after six years as a club team — Bill Grothe took over as its first official coach. By day he ran the college's financial aid office; by fall afternoons he built a program that quietly became one of the winningest at Stevens, trailing only the men's tennis team in win percentage over his tenure. He also inherited a ready-made star: junior Al Alonso, who had already helped push the sport to varsity status and would go on to succeed him as coach just weeks after Grothe's last mention as coach in 1984. Grothe himself stayed at Stevens a few years longer as Registrar before leaving in 1987 for a law career at Broadcast Music, Inc.
No head coach on record for roughly 6 years
Head Coach, Cross Country Club
A Stevens alumnus (class of 1970) working in the college's Metallurgy Department, Lloyd revived cross country as a club sport in 1974 after a long dormant stretch — and then laced up alongside the runners he coached. He ran the Philadelphia Marathon with his own team that December, finishing in 3:37, and lined up again for the Asbury Park Marathon the following January, dropping out at mile 17 with a leg injury next to one of his own runners.
No head coach on record for roughly 21 years
Head Coach
Track was a rare side gig for Misar, not his career — he was Stevens' Director of Physical Education for 43 years (1928-1971), and by 1953 he'd already spent a decade-plus building the school's varsity soccer program (which he founded), coaching baseball every year since 1929, and running the gym department. He ran Stevens' first-ever Interclass Track Meet that spring anyway, open to any student not already playing baseball, lacrosse, or tennis. When student interest sagged ahead of the event, he told the school paper flatly that its success was "solely in the hands of the student body" — not exactly a pep talk, but it got the point across. No dedicated track coach is mentioned in the archive again for over two decades after him.
No head coach on record for roughly 5 years
Head Coach
Track wasn't Triol's day job — he was Stevens' varsity soccer coach, having taken over that program from Frank Misar in 1946 after four years playing soccer at West Chester State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. But the "Stevens Track Club" was barely a club at all in early 1948 — no dues, no meetings, and by its own members' admission, "up to now, no activity" — and Triol, a former champion high hurdler himself, offered to pilot its runners through the indoor season as a side project. Under him the club ran time trials in the 220, 440, 880, and mile to fill out relay teams for intercollegiate meets, giving the sport a real foothold again after years of informal running.
No head coach on record for roughly 5 years
Head Coach, Cross Country
"Chief" O'Keefe wasn't Stevens faculty at all — he was Navy Chief Specialist Robert T. O'Keefe, stationed at Stevens as the Navy's own physical-training director under the wartime V-12 officer training program. When students petitioned to bring back cross country after years without a team, he volunteered to coach it alongside the Navy trainees' indoor track and baseball squads, pitching the Athletic Council on some genuinely ambitious plans: intercollegiate meets at Van Cortlandt Park and, eventually, Madison Square Garden. The Council signed off in October 1943, and O'Keefe's runners debuted that fall against three other colleges, though he held the team back from full competition until they'd logged more practice miles. Before Stevens he'd trained Navy recruits at Norfolk, where he found time to umpire baseball games between teams stacked with major-league talent.
No head coach on record for roughly 14 years
Head Coach, Cross Country
A Stevens Language Department instructor and University of Pennsylvania grad who'd run cross country there himself, Gingrich started Stevens' first cross country team from nothing in October 1928 after a group of students simply asked him to coach it — the sport had no official varsity backing at the time, and he ran practices three days a week on a 2½-mile course he laid out with the college president. The team returned for a second season in 1929, lining up meets against Rutgers and Seton Hall, but by that November the student paper was already asking what had become of it, pinning the fade-out on thin turnout in a student body of over 400.
No head coach on record for roughly 4 years
Head Coach, Track
Mitchell took over the track team in the fall of 1921, running the winter season while longtime coach "Doc" Davis focused on basketball. His tenure ended on a hard note: in February 1924, mounting financial deficits and a wave of academic ineligibility forced the Athletic Board to drop track as a full varsity sport. Mitchell stayed on afterward to piece together relay teams for the Penn Relays and other invitationals, keeping the sport alive in a scaled-back form.
Head Coach, Track
A Stevens alumnus from the class of 1907, McGall returned to campus in 1916 to coach track and quickly became the program's utility man — he also led the school's undefeated 1917 football team on the side. In 1919 he launched Stevens' first cross country squad from scratch, running practices himself and telling would-be quitters exactly what he thought of their excuses: he kept a running list of the alibis he'd already heard ("I have no wind," "I am too heavy," "I am not heavy enough") and promised to tell any man straight whether he had what it took.
Head Coach, Track
A two-time Olympian who won the international mile championship in London in 1908, Sullivan took over the Stevens track team in 1914 and put it through practice three afternoons a week — a big step up in structure for the program. He brought along a famous training partner, too: his personal friend Johnny Hayes, the 1908 Olympic marathon gold medalist, pitched in with coaching and agreed to officiate the home meets.