Cross Country
- Title:
- Head Coach
- Email:
- mark.wetmore@colorado.edu
- Phone:
- 303-492-5226
Colorado head coach Mark Wetmore enters his 28th season at Colorado, his 26th as head coach. He became CU’s sixth head cross country and track and field coach on November 6, 1995. Wetmore is the only Division I cross country coach to win all four NCAA titles – men’s and women’s team and men’s and women’s individual – at the same school.
Wetmore’s squads have won eight national cross country titles since 2000. The women won in 2000 while the men won the following year. Both teams captured the championship again in 2004 (CU became only the third school to win both championships in the same year). The men won again in 2006, 2013 and 2014 before the women recorded their third title in 2018. Wetmore has coached Adam Goucher (1998), Jorge Torres (2002) and Dathan Ritzenhein (2003) to men’s individual cross country titles, while Kara Grgas-Wheeler won the 2000 women’s crown. Dani Jones became the fifth individual under Wetmore to earn an individual NCAA title in 2018. CU athletes have earned 139 All-American cross country honors during his tenure.
Wetmore has been named the NCAA Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Year three times (’00, ’04 and ‘18) and the NCAA Men’s Cross Country Coach of the Year three times (‘06, ‘13 and ‘14). He is a 31-time conference coach of the year, and in 2014, USA Track and Field named him the USA Co-Coach of the Year.
In addition to national titles, his teams won 23 Big 12 Cross Country Team Titles (11 women’s, 12 men’s), 16 individual Big 12 Cross Country Titles and Wetmore was named Big 12 Conference Cross Country Coach of the Year 19 times. He was the winningest Big 12 Conference head coach among all sports when CU left the conference in 2011.
CU joined the Pac-12 Conference in the fall of 2011 and Wetmore’s teams won the inaugural Pac-12 men’s and women’s titles – the first Pac-12 Championships in any sport. His men won the first six titles (2011-16) and again in ‘19 for seven titles, while his women have won a total of four (2011, ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17). Jones became the first individual to win a Pac-12 cross country crown, earning back-to-back titles (2017 and ‘18). Then in 2019, Joe Klecker became the first CU male to win a Pac-12 cross country title.
On the track, Wetmore’s athletes have had a strong presence at the conference, national and professional levels. They’ve captured 107 individual conference titles, two conference team titles, 21 NCAA individual titles and earned 220 All-American honors. CU athletes have broken seven collegiate middle and long distance records.
CU runners’ success at the professional and post-collegiate level is unmatched by any university: over two dozen Buff grads have signed professional contracts. They’ve combined for more than 50 USA titles in cross country, track & field and road racing. Since 2000, 10 CU athletes or graduates have earned 19 U.S. Olympic Team berths at distances from 1,500-meters through the marathon. Fourteen current and former Buffs have earned 33 spots on U.S. World Championship Track Teams and 25 have combined for 61 berths on U.S. World Championship Cross Country Teams. Since 2004, CU graduates have won seven medals in distance running at World Championships – Shayne Culpepper (bronze, 2004 Indoor 3k), Kara Goucher (silver, 2007 10k), Dathan Ritzenhein (bronze, 2009 Half Marathon), Jenny Simpson (gold, 2011, silver, 2013 and silver, 2017 1,500m) and Emma Coburn (gold, 2017 steeplechase). Coburn (steeplechase) and Simpson (1,500) became the first to win Olympic medals, both bronze, at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. They were the first American women to medal in their respective events.
Charles Mark Wetmore graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English Education from Rutgers in 1978 before receiving his Master’s in movement sciences from Columbia in 1998.
