After a solid performance in the heptathlon at the ACC Championships, I accomplished one major goal I had for my first year at Duke: qualify for the NCAA Indoor Championships.  I was a little bit shocked, however, when I discovered that I was the first male Duke athlete to qualify for the indoor nationals since 1982.  Duke track has produced multiple NCAA Champions, Olympians, and world record holders since the 1950s—yet no qualifier to the NCAA indoors in the past 28 years.  What happened to the Duke track legacy?

 The 1981-1982 school year marks a special time for the track team.  Not only because of Bryan Allf qualifying to the nationals in the 2 mile, but because this was when the Women’s Track and Cross Country programs were established after Title IX came into effect.  Part of beginning women’s varsity sports at Duke meant that less funding could be allocated to the men’s sports, so when the former assistant athletic director and long time track coach, Al Buehler, gave up all three of his men’s scholarships to fund women’s sports, he gambled the success of his men’s program for the bigger cause of gender equality.

Almost 30 years later, the men’s track team is finally starting to receive its scholarships back (we’re at about 7 scholarships, half of the maximum allowed by NCAA).  We’re still going to “take the talent we have and stretch it as far as we can” as Coach Buehler once said, but now we can do it while attracting the high school blue-chippers. 

With the increased support from athletic department, the men’s track squad has been able to start doing damage on the national level: our recruiting was ranked 6th in the United States for 2009, the our 4x800 relay set a meet record at the prestigious New Balance Invitational, and I was able to set a world record in the Heptathlon 1000 meter run at the NCAA Indoor Championships en route to a 12th place overall finish.  We’ve come a long way, but we are still fervently seeking to return to (or possibly surpass) the 70s Duke track dominance and join the women’s cross country team as a major national power in the NCAA.

-Curtis Beach ‘13