Sharp as Iron, Good as Gold
Megan McGinnis enjoyed a breakout season as a sophomore pacesetter for Duke's ACC championship track & field team
John Roth, GoDuke The Magazine
This story originally appeared in the 14.11 Issue of GoDuke The Magazine - June 2023
For nearly a decade, the 4x400 meter relay has stood out as the signature event for the Duke women’s track & field team. The unit has qualified for NCAA outdoor nationals eight of the last nine seasons, the school record gets broken virtually every year, and lately the relay contingent has had a major say in who claims the ACC team championship.
Such was the case again this past February when the Blue Devils approached the starting line for the last event of the ACC indoor championships. They trailed Virginia Tech by two points in the team standings, and with the Hokies no factor in the relay (they would place 10th for no points) Duke merely needed to finish in the top half of the 4x400 field to claim the outright conference crown.
Having won three straight 4x400 league titles (two outdoor, one indoor), the Blue Devils weren’t looking to merely finish, however; they aimed to win the relay and post a time fast enough to qualify for NCAA indoor nationals. They were well on their way to accomplishing all of those goals when the unthinkable happened.
Sophomore anchor Megan McGinnis was speeding toward the finish line, just a second or so away and perfectly positioned in first place, when her hand carrying the baton collided with the hand of the Miami anchor who was just off her shoulder. The nudge forced the baton out of McGinnis’ grasp and into the track infield just before she crossed the line, thus disqualifying the Blue Devils from the race. There was a protest and a review but the DQ stood — Duke did not get the baton across the line and could not be credited with a finish.
In one devastating instant, everything Duke was on the verge of achieving crashed and burned. No ACC team championship. No repeat relay title. No qualifying time for NCAAs. Given the consequences, it was likely the most humbling moment of the 2022-23 season across all of Duke Athletics.
It would have been understandable, maybe even expected, if the central figure in that adversity had struggled to move past it. Instead, what came next for Megan McGinnis was a spring outdoor season rivaled by few in program history.
A 400-meter specialist, McGinnis broke the school record in the open outdoor 400 to go along with the 400 indoor record she had set in the winter. She won the ACC 400 outdoor championship to accompany her indoor title, giving her the season sweep. She anchored her 4x400 squad at the Penn Relays to produce the fastest time in school and ACC history, then at season’s end led her unit to the finals at NCAA nationals and an eighth place finish that gave them first-team All-America honors. She also took second-team All-America honors with another school record performance in the open 400 — 51.30 seconds, good for 11th place nationally.
Perhaps most significantly, she was one of the forces that propelled Duke to the outright ACC women’s track championship at the annual outdoor meet, with the Blue Devils blowing away the competition on the strength of the best score in modern league history. Duke registered points in 17 of the 21 events for 145.5 total, 61 ahead of runnerup Virginia Tech.
“A lot of that is a result of what happened indoors and the motivation and the way the girls rallied around Megan,” noted director of track & field Shawn Wilbourn.
“Indoors was tough. The whole team, the coaching staff, we all thought we had it won. There was a moment of chaos there, we realized this happened, we’re not going to win this. My first priority was Megan because the brunt of that loss was kind of cast upon her. I got straight to her, talked to her, let her know that we support her, we love her, we’re going to learn from this and move on and get better. And the rest of the team just rallied around her, it motivated them, and you could see the results outdoors how everybody stepped up and we weren’t going to let that happen again.”
Wilbourn, named ACC women’s track coach of the year for the second time in three seasons, credits McGinnis’ maturity for her ability to handle the indoor disappointment. She owned the moment but admits it wasn’t easy to process.
“We got on the line and we had a chance to win the team title,” she recalled. “We wanted to go for the win. We wanted to go to nationals in that event and we needed to get a bubble time. We wanted the school record. We wanted to leave no doubt… and you feel that just slip out of your hands. It was a surreal moment honestly. I remember crossing the line and thinking there’s no way that just happened after we did all of that. So it was really hard.
“But I think something special that happened after the 4x4 was feeling the support of the team. I don’t think there are many teams out there in the NCAA where after something like that happens, if you lose a team title like that, every single person on the team is coming up to the anchor and saying, ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. You had a great meet.’ Giving you a hug. I felt unconditional support from my teammates in that moment and that made the moment right there easier. And afterwards, knowing that we were by the numbers the best team in the ACC and we didn’t get that team title, it lit a fire and we were ready to do something really special outdoors.”
Even with the ACC indoor adversity, McGinnis’ sophomore season was something special — a breakout year from a talented athlete who had to clear some prominent challenges in high school just to land a spot on the Duke roster.
Growing up, McGinnis was much more passionate about lacrosse than track. She had designs on a college lacrosse career before suffering a knee injury her sophomore year of high school, thus missing all the key recruiting showcases that summer. Then just as she was finally cleared to return to the field/track as a junior, the covid pandemic shut everything down.
As her senior year approached, she says she realized she might have a higher ceiling in running than lacrosse so she started emailing college coaches with some of the times she had posted on the track before her knee injury. “It was almost like a Hail Mary. Let me just see what happens here,” she explained.
One of those emails went to Duke sprints coach Mark Mueller, who responded favorably to get the recruiting ball rolling with the Blue Devils.
“When Coach Mueller first started recruiting her and we looked at the video of her competing in high school, we really liked how she ran and we saw she was a diamond in the rough. She’s proved us correct, made us look good,” Wilbourn said. “She’s continued to get better and better and we’re really excited about her. As a coach that’s what we work every year to do — find that diamond in the rough. And when you actually find one and they really start to produce, it’s a good feeling.”
Arriving as a Duke freshman in fall 2021, McGinnis knew she faced a steep learning curve. While focused on lacrosse, she hadn’t invested much time and effort in running during her high school days and felt “out of my depth in terms of just the knowledge and experience that a lot of people have in the sport.” There was also the uncertainty of not knowing if she could get back to her pre-injury level of performance on the track, given how much time she had been away from competition. As she started knocking a few seconds off her prep PRs, “mostly I was just relieved.”
Amidst the learning, training and returning to form, McGinnis was able to carve out a starting role on the Blue Devils’ esteemed 4x400 relay unit. She was well familiar with the 4x4 legacy at Duke and had watched on TV at home in Roanoke, Va., the previous spring when the group won the ACC relay title to give the Blue Devils a tie for the women’s team championship.
“It’s like the coolest video ever,” she said. “Then I watched them become All-Americans (at the NCAAs) in Eugene, so I knew coming in that the Duke 4x4 squad was up there — really really good.”
McGinnis was the impact rookie on a 4x4 team that won the ACC indoor and outdoor titles her freshman year. The indoor win once again boosted the Blue Devils to a tie for the overall women’s team title, while the outdoor performance broke the stadium record at Duke’s home track, which played host to the meet. Running their season-best time at NCAA regionals, the squad continued Duke’s string of trips to NCAA nationals. The Blue Devils’ 4x4 has missed nationals just once since 2014.
“When I first came to Duke we were primarily a distance program,” said Wilbourn, who took over as head coach three years ago after 10 years as associate coach. “We really didn’t have any sprinters. In order to build a program and get some notoriety, we needed to have an event on the track and I just felt the 4x4, we could recruit and build that event at Duke. That became a priority, we started having success, it grew and here we are, one of the best teams in the nation.”
Ten years ago, in 2013, the school record was 3:37.51. It has gradually been lowered by more than 10 seconds since then. This year, the 4x4 unit established the newest mark of 3:27.14 with a spectacular run at the Penn Relays that stands as the fastest 4x4 in ACC history.
FASTEST 4x4 IN ACC HISTORY ??
— Duke Track & Field and Cross Country (@DukeTFXC) April 29, 2023
Our team of Megan McGinnis, Julia Jackson, Madison Mulder, and Lauren Tolbert ran 3:27.14 to take down the precious ACC record that stood since 2006!#GoDuke pic.twitter.com/dT7bHFi1Sl
McGinnis handled anchor duties, as she did most of the season, alongside three Blue Devil newcomers — freshmen Julia Jackson and Lauren Tolbert and graduate transfer Madison Mulder, a previous NCAA Division III national champion at SUNY Geneseo.
“I think we were all blown away by the time we actually did run, but we did know that we had it in us,” Mulder said. “Being able to execute it in the race at Penn Relays was really fun and super exciting. Meg split a 50.1 on her leg and I know she has the potential to go sub-50, so I’m going to be really excited when that does actually happen.”
McGinnis sees the daily competition within Duke’s stable of 400-meter runners as a major factor in the speed she’s been able to unleash this season.
“Our coach likes to say that iron sharpens iron. That’s the concept of when you are pushing yourself in practice with people who are also really fast, you’re going to receive a lot of benefit there. And I think learning how to run the race is really important. My freshman year I was always really nervous to get out hard in the 400 because I thought that I would die off at the end. Having the confidence this year to take it out a little faster and trusting the training and trusting my fitness to still finish the race strong has helped me to cut off a chunk of time.”
A Season to Remember
INDIVIDUAL
• ACC champion, 400m indoor
• ACC champion, 400m outdoor
• ACC silver medal, 200m outdoor
• Duke record, 400m indoor
• Duke record, 400m outdoor
• NCAA All-America, 400m outdoor (2nd team)
RELAYS
• ACC champion, DMR (distance medley relay) indoor
• ACC and Duke record, DMR indoor
• NCAA All-America, DMR indoor (2nd team)
• ACC and Duke record, 4x400 outdoor
• NCAA All-America, 4x400 outdoor (1st team)
• NCAA qualifier, 4x100 outdoor
It also helps, she acknowledges, to build trust and unity within the relay unit, which she helped foster this season as the leader of a young group.
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” McGinnis said. “It’s a lot of fun to pull those girls onto that relay and run with them. We have two really talented freshmen that I’ve had fun competing with. Getting to sort of set the mindset and mentality for that 4x4 is really cool.
“In the 4x4 you have to make a split-second decision, like when you are chasing a girl ahead of you, ‘Am I going to go with her? Am I going to chase her down?’ When you know the girls running with you on that relay have your back no matter what choice you make, it’s a lot easier to make the scarier one.”
During her breakout sophomore year, McGinnis learned just how much teammate support can mean in navigating the road from diamond in the rough to sparkling gemstone.
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