A Brief History of College Triathlon
Very brief.
This weekend is/was the USAT Collegiate Club National Championship—a much beloved event. Thousands of college club athletes from around the country—many very competitive, many in costumes—race the classic Olympic-distance event (still considered the premier race of the weekend), a mixed relay, and a draft-legal race that all combine for the overall team title. This is 100% different, by the way, from the new NCAA women’s racing.
READ: Our short explanation of the difference between collegiate club triathlon and NCAA college triathlon.
It seems appropriate, then, to talk about the history of how college tri has become what it is now.
(Note: Some of the following is based on archival reporting, some of it is from previous reporting I’ve done—I’ve been covering the NCAA movement since it started, and a lot of it is from my own personal on-the-ground knowledge as a collegiate triathlete.)
Before the mid-2000s
I raced on the UC Berkeley college club triathlon team from 2005-2007. My husband raced on it from 2001-2005. Today, Cal’s team is regularly the biggest college club team in the country; usually around 100 people. But back in 2001 it was a handful of graduate students who mostly did local races, like Al’s Backyard Tri—where everyone leaned their bikes against the fence in, you guessed it, Al’s backyard.
Throughout the 1990s, most college athletes were older grad student or community college students. Many college races started as student projects put on for college credit. (That sort of how Julie Moss got her start!) Most college races, then, didn’t last past the organizing student’s graduation. One exception being the March Triathlon Series at Cal Poly, which is the oldest college race on the West Coast and has been in existence since 1998.
There used to be just two big national collegiate races annually: One was a self-declared college national championship that Wildflower hosted. The pros raced the long-course one day and the college kids headlined the Olympic-distance race the other day. (And, yes, there was lots of partying; this lasted well into Wildflower’s eventual decline in the mid-2010s.) The second national-level college race, throughout the 1990s, was a “Collegiate Challenge” held at the Great Clermont Triathlon in Florida. However, I don’t think that race lasted past the ‘90s and typically only attracted about 100 college athletes.
The big change happened in 2002-2003, when USA Triathlon took over the national championship race, making it official and creating room then for growth. Here’s the t-shirt from that first or second year, all of which were originally held in Arizona because of weather and timing:
Mid-2000s to 2010s
Unsurprisingly, the big college growth coincided with the big growth in triathlon overall throughout the 2000s. After USAT took over the national championship race, it became a much larger event—doubling in size from 2005 to 2007. College club teams also started creating their own conferences and hosting their own races as fundraisers to pay for the trip to nationals. We had the West Coast Collegiate Triathlon Conference (WCCTC) out here—which doesn’t really seem to exist anymore—and we organized our own Bearathlon.
In 2006, nationals was held in Reno, Nevada—not a great idea in April, by the way—and was part of this huge extreme sports festival that was filmed and turned into a TV show that aired on one of the ESPNs. (I can not find any record of this show, but I distinctly remember everyone going to one of our team member’s sororities for a viewing party when it aired.)
In 2007, nationals was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And, in retrospect, that was the year that I think really marked the turning point of the event, the year they realized they had something legit on their hands, with 1,000 athletes from all over the country. You can see a grainy Youtube USAT recap here. There were team spirit awards, an off-book afterparty, and names you would recognize as athletes who went on to serious pro careers. No results exist online from pre-2008, but I can tell you Ben Hoffman won in 2006 and Kevin Collington won in 2007.
Also, fun fact: To be able to afford to get all of our bikes from California to Alabama—since we were an unfunded club sport with no university money—we rented a U-Haul one way from Oakland to Berkeley (about 5 miles) that came with unlimited one-way mileage. And then two of the team drove our bikes from Oakland to Berkeley by way of Tuscaloosa. #collegetri
From then to today
In 2014, USAT announced the NCAA effort, which is on track now to make women’s draft-legal sprint tri a full-fledged varsity sport by 2024. (There are a few more steps, and this isn’t the official stance, but I think it should be done by end of next year.) One of the things frequently cited at the time was how big the college movement had become, as evidenced by the growth of collegiate clubs. I’d say, though—based on talking to lots of coaches and athletes—there are mixed feelings about the NCAA effort among the club teams, many of whom believe that if the money and attention had instead been focused on their much larger base it could do more. (Ultimately, the goal is probably a two-prong approach: all-comers clubs *and* varsity teams.)
In 2014-15, I was doing a grad school fellowship at USC, so I started training and racing with the USC college club team, and collegiate triathlon had turned into quite the thing in my absence. (The USC team was also what, ultimately, brought me back into triathlon after having basically quit, and what led me to racing pro.)
By the mid-2010s, most large schools seemed to have a club team. Competition at the top level was quite good and, in general, things had gotten more serious—though, because clubs are ‘anyone welcome’ and there are many first-timers, the range of ability was and still is huge. The top athletes at the national collegiate club championship are, at this point, certainly hoping to translate a win into sponsorships, a spot on the elite national team, or a pro career. (Though it’s an official USAT national championship, USA Triathlon does not currently operate the Collegiate Club National Championship; it’s contracted out to a third-party race director, much like many of the other USAT national championships.) But there are still many, many club athletes who are also just out there, like at any triathlon in the world, and there are still a lot of college cheers, dances, and parties. Just not as many as there used to be.
The number of college triathletes leveled off in the mid-2010 (similar to triathlon’s overall growth), but there are efforts—like this one—to now follow the college sport as an actual college sport. But there’s one big question I think too many people assume they know the answer to: Will getting more triathletes hooked in college turn them into lifers (or quasi-lifers) for the sport, will it actually grow the sport? I’m not sure this is really as obvious as people seem to think. Almost everyone I know from collegiate triathlon doesn’t really do tri anymore; the majority of them Crossfit now.
And that’s a brief history of how college tri got to this moment. What’s next?
