Duke cross country's Shaun Thompson takes aim at NCAA championships, All-American honors

The rest of the Blue Devils have started preparing for the indoor track season, but graduate student Shaun Thompson’s postseason is not over.

After earning an automatic berth to the national championships with a second-place finish at the Southeast Regional championship last Friday, Thompson will toe the line in Louisville, Ky., Saturday at 1 p.m. for his final 10-kilometer race in a Duke uniform. The race will be live-streamed on NCAA.com as Thompson and 250 of the nation’s best take on the E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park championship course.

The Blue Devils’ lone representative at the NCAA championships could earn All-America honors with a top-40 finish, but the Baldwinsville, N.Y., native has a loftier goal for his final cross country race.

“I’m actually looking for at least top 20. I think I’m in that kind of shape,” Thompson said. “I’ve shown it in the other big races—Pre-Nationals, ACCs and this past regional race—that I can run with people who are ranked at the top of the country. My goal is to keep doing what has been working, trying to keep it honest and stay up front, make sure it’s a real race and just go from there.”

The Blue Devil standout earned his trip to Louisville with that strategy, moving into the lead pack from the start of the regional championship race Nov. 13. Thompson controlled the pace from the two-kilometer mark on, and with 2,000 meters to go, only Thomas Curtin of Virginia Tech and Edwin Kibichiy of Louisville remained out front with him. Sprinting through the final 800 meters, Curtin pulled ahead for the win, and the Duke harrier finished four seconds later.

Thompson covered the 10-kilometer course at Panorama Farms in a personal-best time of 29:11.7. But he had also wiped away the memory of his last race on the same course—the 2013 Southeast Regional championships where he fell short of his goal of qualifying for nationals.

“[Last weekend's] race was actually the most mentally strenuous,” Thompson said. “To be at the cross country race where I did not perform as well two years ago was almost a mental block I had to work through. But I just kept focused and had to remind myself of the training I had put in between that time and now and that I’m in a better spot. I used that to carry me through.”

Thompson redshirted the 2014 season to put in an additional year of training before taking one more shot at his goal, while missing the opportunity to race a final season with his classmates and leaving a younger squad without its senior captain.

But his decision proved to be the right one, both for Thompson achieving his first national championship berth and for bringing life back to the men’s team after a disappointing 2014 season.

The Blue Devil men finished 12th out of 15 in conference standings in 2014 but jumped up four spots this season with Thompson back on the roster. Duke did not field a full team to place at last season’s Southeast Regional championship—the squad finished eighth last Friday with a huge scoring boost from their captain’s runner-up individual finish.

“This has been one of my favorite years by far,” Thompson said. “The team really came together and clicked in a way I don’t think we really have in my other years here. It was awesome to see that all of the guys were getting along and stepped up, and people came out of the woodwork. It was a great atmosphere and a great vibe that really carried us through the season.”

But Thompson will race alone one last time in the postseason.

With just eight days to recover from the hilly Panorama Farms 10-kilometer race, Thompson has focused on doing everything he can to keep his legs fresh for Saturday.

As just the 14th Duke harrier to reach the national championship, he has the opportunity to make program history again as just the second Blue Devil to earn All-America accolades since Sean Kelly finished 36th in 2001.

“Shaun could be the highest NCAA finisher in Duke history,” Duke head coach Norm Ogilvie said. “We are boldly shooting for top 10. But he’s going in coming off the best race of his career, he has peaked, he is confident, he’s a fifth-year senior—everything is there to allow him to believe that he’s a top-10 guy.”