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Girls Cross Country State Title Highlights Decorated Fall for DA Athletics

By Dylan Howlett

6-minute read

It was toward the end of an “easy” summer training run, which meant sustaining an eight-minute pace for 50 minutes on a sweltering July day, when Harper Maxwell ’28 first had the premonition. She turned to Audrey Crowder ’26, the 2022 NCISAA individual state champion in girls cross country and, by fall’s end, the Durham Academy recordholder in the girls 5000 meters. “We,” Maxwell said, “are gonna win a state title this year.”

Some 20 weeks later, by which point each member of the DA girls cross country team had clipped off roughly 600 miles during the season, the premonition resurfaced. On the eve of the state meet in Charlotte, both Maxwell and Elliot Register ’28 dreamt that DA had won it all. So convincing was the vision that Maxwell awakened in the middle of the night and hurriedly checked Instagram for a triumphant post. In mere hours, it would become real, the runners smiling so much on the bus ride home that their faces began to hurt, with the state championship trophy — DA’s first cross country state title since 2019 — buckled snugly into a front seat.

“It still feels unreal to me,” Crowder said four days later.

A month before Maxwell had her premonition, head coach Costen Irons ’98 had his. He watched as seven members of the girls cross country team ran, and laughed, together for the duration of a June training session. His assistants — kindergarten teacher Sloan Nuernberger, Upper School history and Latin teacher Dr. John Phillips, and former DA track and cross country coach Dennis Cullen — could see it, too. So could Middle School head coach and social studies teacher Virginia Hall ’91 and Middle School assistant coach Chase Osorio whenever they attended varsity meets. This group, Irons thought, is going to be a pretty good team. The Cavs would coalesce into one over the next few months, culminating in their second straight conference title — and third in four years — in mid-October.

Their task at states, however, remained daunting. Charlotte Country Day, considered the Cavs’ stiffest competition, had bested DA twice during the season, though only one second separated the schools’ average times. Crowder would be charged with hunting down Rabun Gap’s Bailey Brackett, one of the state’s fastest runners. On the week of the state meet, Maxwell and Register decamped to a Starbucks and closely studied the times of the top competitors. In the end, Helen Barritt ’28 said, the Cavaliers identified five paths to victory. They only had to find one. “We just went in knowing everyone has a job,” she said.

That is, of course, the beauty of cross country. Crowder trailed Brackett by 40 seconds at the mile mark. She would shave off 33 seconds down the stretch and finish second by a mere seven seconds. Barritt crossed the line in seventh, narrowly behind her primary competition from Charlotte Country Day, and burst into tears; she thought DA had lost. Maxwell crossed the finish line five seconds later, good for ninth. Their fate was left to the eighth grader on Maxwell’s heels and, a little farther back, Maxwell’s fellow state championship dreamer.

The eighth grader, Sybil Ludington ’30, has a distinct advantage, Barritt said. She loves her sport, so much so that — in the midst of a long training run with her teammates — Ludington will spontaneously exclaim, “Guys, I just love to run.” At the conference meet, Ludington and Maxwell were running together before Ludington fell off the pace in the final mile. She approached Maxwell and Barritt afterward, with just a week before states, and asked how she could avoid losing time down the stretch. Her teammates counseled Ludington to go out a little more conservatively. It worked at states. As Ludington started to carve up the Larry McAfee Course at McAlpine Creek Park, she heard Hall yell over the din of the meet: “Sybil! You’re running the race of your life!” She was: Ludington set a personal record by more than 25 seconds.

It would all come down to Register. Eight days before, she had passed two competitors on her way to a seventh-place finish at the conference meet and earned All-Conference honors. For most of the season, she had balanced running with commitments to her club soccer team, which had a game a few days before the state meet. On the day of the soccer match, Irons had a second premonition: Register meant too much to the team, and its chances of making Maxwell’s vision come true, to risk injury or fatigue at a soccer game.

He dashed from the PE teachers’ office in the Preschool/Lower School Gym to the Upper School campus, where he wandered the halls of the STEM & Humanities Center until Barritt interceded and pointed him in the direction of Register’s Honors Algebra 2 class. He didn’t know that Register had already reached the same conclusion, or that she had chosen not to play in the soccer match, or that she felt, as much as he did, that a championship trophy was within their reach. But he got a chance to deliver the message himself. “We need you at your freshest for Friday,” he said. And she was: Register passed another pair of runners down the stretch and set her own PR by 31 seconds to grab 22nd place. The crown was DA’s.

It was the first team title for Crowder, the five-time All-State honoree who set the pace — both in time and in culture — as captain. “When your best athlete is kind, humble, interacts with others and is completely invested in the team, it takes care of a lot of things,” Irons said.

“What Audrey really did for the team this year,” Phillips said, “was get that whole group — from Sybil, an eighth grader who had never run in a varsity race before this season, all the way on up — and get them all happy about supporting each other, and excited about each other’s success, and focused in all the workouts.”

“She has such a great work ethic,” Nuernberger said. “She’s so disciplined. It just creates this culture. She’s also a really awesome, nice person. She’s just kind of everything.”

Crowder would regularly give eighth graders rides to summer workouts. Maxwell likened her to a sister. “When I think of DA girls cross country,” Barritt said, “I think of Audrey.” As she huddled with her teammates in the moments before the start of this year’s state meet, Crowder saw in some of their eyes unmistakable nerves — and so she led them through a guided breathing exercise. When Crowder’s name was announced in Charlotte as the second-place individual finisher, all of the student-athletes and coaches from TISAC schools stood and applauded.

She thought, in that moment, not just of her own journey in the program. She also thought of this season, and how the Cavs had grown as a team, and grown individually, and fought their own battles with injuries and plateaus and self-doubt, with as much care and conviction as Maxwell felt when she first spoke into existence the team’s destiny.

“It’s such a different, even more special feeling,” Crowder said, “than winning the individual title.”

That’s how it feels when you spend 20 weeks together running down a dream.

 

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Girls Tennis Finishes 2nd in State Tournament

After winning its fifth consecutive TISAC title, and stretching its prolific run of conference dominance to 79 wins in its last 80 TISAC matches, and reaching the state semifinals for the 10th time in the last 11 years, the Durham Academy girls tennis team authored yet another chapter of what Pogach described as their “consistent domination.”

The Cavs upset top-seeded — and previously undefeated — Providence Day School in the semifinals of the NCISAA 4A girls tennis championships. The Cavs would push second-seeded Charlotte Country Day to the brink in the final, falling 5–4 in what ultimately amounted to a difference of just a few points in multiple singles matches.

The season was an unqualified success in the eyes of head coach Warrick Taylor. The Cavs bucked their early-season tradition of launching directly into a challenging tournament and instead held a weeklong retreat in Wilmington, with a match sprinkled in against the formidable program at Hoggard High School. They enjoyed all of the end-of-summer trappings that are, at times, hard to find for fall athletes who dive headlong into their seasons, including a canoe trip along the sound. “They had a chance to bond as a team,” Taylor said, “and I feel like those are the memories that they’re going to remember.”

The Cavs will likely pair those with some fond memories from the season itself. Warrick and Pogach set up a daunting schedule that featured tougher non-conference opponents on the front end — Jordan, East Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, Riverside, Cardinal Gibbons — to gird the Cavs for an extended postseason run. It helps, too, to have talent. The Cavs essentially had a trio of No. 1 players at their disposal: Danna Chaparro ’26, Leah Yang ’29 and Keerthi Nelluri ’27, the latter of whom is new to DA this school year and would, by season’s end, rank as the No. 2 player in the state. Her potential wasn’t lost on Taylor when Nelluri visited campus in the spring. “We just hit the jackpot,” he said to his coaching staff, later likening her arrival to that of former Duke men’s basketball star Cooper Flagg.

At every match, the Cavs could not so much pencil in as “Sharpie in” a point from the lead doubles team of Nelluri and Chaparro: They were undefeated in their doubles matches through the duration of the regular-season and postseason. “They’re definitely going to go down in history, those two — the dynamic Donna and Keerthi — as one of the winningest doubles teams at DA,” Taylor said. The difference at the state final, in the end, was nothing more than a few points in tightly contested matches against a decorated program.

“We could not have been better prepared for this final,” Taylor said. “We definitely gave it our best shot.”

 

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Fall Sports Roundup

The DA fall athletics season boasted other highlights beyond the achievements of girls cross country, girls golf and girls tennis:

• At the conclusion of the fall season, DA sits in second place in the 4A division of the Wells Fargo Cup, a yearlong competition that tracks the cumulative performances of each school’s boys and girls athletics programs.
• All seven fall teams — boys cross country, girls cross country, girls golf, field hockey, boys soccer, girls tennis and volleyball — finished in the top 6 of the final state standings.
• After starting their season 1–4, the boys soccer team won their next 15 games, a streak that lasted eight weeks. The Cavs lost in the quarterfinals of the state tournament to eventual 4A state champion Christ School.
• The field hockey team allowed the winning goal in the final minutes of its state quarterfinal meeting with Charlotte Latin School, the eventual state runner-up.
• The volleyball team, which featured four ninth graders in its rotation, fell 3–1 in the state quarterfinals to Charlotte Country Day — and two of the three sets that the Cavs lost were decided by two points each.