Team History
After breaking through in 1992 to win its first Middle Atlantic Conference outdoor track championship in a half century, Haverford took the last six crowns in the old MAC and has won 42 of the 43 Centennial cross country, indoor and outdoor track & field titles since the advent of that conference.
Not coincidentally, the college dedicated its new all-weather 400-meter Johnson Track on historic Walton Field early last decade.
Haverford boasts 110 cross country and track & field All-Americans since 1978, including 24 individual champions and a championship relay team. The Fords' top five all-time milers average 4:01.1, headed by nine-time NCAA 800 and 1,500 champion Karl Paranya '97, who became the first and only Division III runner ever to run a sub-4 mile (3:57.6) as a senior. Haverford has had a runner in the last four U.S. Olympic trials -- Paranya (1,500 in 1996 and 2000), five-time NCAA champ Seamus McElligott '91 (10,000 in 1992) and Liam O'Neill '85 (1,500 in 1988) -- and nearly had a fourth in three-time Division III champion and NCAA Postgraduate Scholar Kevin Foley '83, who missed the 1,500 trials in 1984 by two-tenths of a second. Foley's 3:44.50 in the 1500m at the 1982 NCAA Division III Championships still stands - over two decades later - as the meet record.
One of Haverford's oldest sports, early Ford track teams won or placed high in turn-of-the-century Penn Relays, and Phillip Baker, later known as Lord Noel-Baker, a one-year visitor from England set the college mile record. Baker went on to become Haverford's first track Olympian, competing for Great Britain in the 1920 games. By the end of that decade, the Ford thinclads, under legendary coach A.W. "Pop" Haddleton and led by weight thrower J. Howard Morris '30, were the dominant team in the large Middle Atlantic Conference.
His name synonymous with Haverford track, Haddleton found unlikely athletes who he thought had potential and developed hundreds of them into top track men into the 1950's. Haddleton's finest protege may have been Jim Grosholz '49, whose career climaxed at the 1949 NCAA outdoors in an 800 showdown with U.S. Olympian Mal Whitfield of Ohio State at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Haddleton was the prime mover in the construction of Alumni Field House in the late '50's, and the indoor track there, now a state-of-the-art 200-meter oval with textured surface, is named for him.
The team remained strong through the 1950s while the '60s were more a time for individual achievement, such as the javelin exploits of Stu Levitt '63, who won the NCAA College Division championship and barely missed qualifying for the 1964 U.S. Olympic team. A renaissance was begun during the Haverford coaching days of Villanova alumnus Francis "Dixie" Dunbar in the late 1960's and early '70s, but it was another Jumbo Elliott protégé, Wildcat All-American Tom Donnelly, who put Haverford back on the national track & field map the last three decades.