Brown University Men's Cross Country

Springfield was named the Director of Track & Field/Cross Country in June of 2013. He previously served as the Interim Director of Track & Field/Cross Country during the 2012-13 campaign.  Springfield, who also serves as head coach of the mens cross county team, led the Bears to several impressive team and individual performances during the 2014-15 season. On the women's side, Brown boasted the top first-year athlete in the country in two events, as Natalie Schudrowitz was the top first-year steeplechaser in the NCAA and Josie Natrasevschi was the top first-year discus thrower in the NCAA. On the men's side, the Bears placed third overall at the Ivy League Indoor Championship, marking the program's best finish since 2001. Under Springfields direction, the mens team finished third overall at the 2013 Ivy League Heptagonal Outdoor Track & Field Championships, which equaled the best outdoor team finish in program history. Individually, Springfield and his staff coached the Bears to 12 school records between the 2012-13 indoor and outdoor seasons, including at least one record in every event group. The track & field team also posted a total of 58 top-ten performances on the Brown all-time list, a reflection of the staffs remarkable impact on the programs record book over the past year. Springfield has made an immediate impact to the distance program since his arrival in 2010. In 2011, the cross country team improved from eighth to fifth in the NCAA Northeast Region and eighth to fourth in the Ivy League. At the 2011 Heptagonal Cross Country Championships, Brown had two runners earn first-team All-Ivy honors, equaling the best in the league. In track, eight mens distance runners have qualified for the first round of the NCAA Championships and two athletes have advanced to the NCAA National Championships. In 2012, Cross Country and Track All-American Dan Lowry broke a twenty-five-year-old school record in the 5000m, running 13:34.49 and qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Trials.  In just three seasons, Springfields athletes placed 34 marks on the all-time Brown top-ten list, including 4 school records (1000m, 5000m, 4x800m, DMR). Before coming to Brown, Springfield coached at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) and at the University of Wisconsin. At St. Thomas, Springfield had a hand in 53 conference team titles over a span of 13 years for men and women in cross country and track. His women's distance medley relay was the 2010 DIII National Champions, and his athletes established 32 school record performances in 11 middle- and long-distance events. He also coached 14 different middle- and long-distance runners to 45 All-American awards. For his efforts, Springfield was named the Division III National Men's Assistant Coach of the Year in 2009. Springfield also served as an Adjunct Professor of English at St. Thomas, teaching literature and writing. Prior to his tenure at St. Thomas, Springfield was an assistant coach at the University of Wisconsin, during which time the Badgers won six Big Ten Cross Country titles, two Big Ten Track titles, and one NCAA National title. Among the athletes Springfield helped recruit to Wisconsin were two eventual NCAA champions. Springfield competed collegiately at the University of Virginia, where he was a cross country All-American and led his team to an ACC team title and a 5th place national finish. He also broke the Virginia school record in the indoor 5000m and was twice ACC runner-up. As a freshman at Virginia, he earned a spot on the USA Junior National Team and competed in the 1500m at the Junior Pan-American games in Venezuela. He graduated with a degree in English Literature from Virginia and also holds a graduate degree in Literature from the University of Wisconsin. As a post-collegiate, he placed 6th in the US Cross Country Championships. Springfield is married and lives with his wife Mary Heather Smith in Providence.

Baker has developed his teams and event groups to elite Ivy, Regional and NCAA levels on the trails, track, and in the classroom, respectively. In all, cross country athletes under his tutelage have earned All-Ivy recognition eight times, All-Region nine times, NCAA individual qualification twice, All-America once, and named to the USATF Junior Cross Country Team once. All five cross country teams earned United States Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) All-Academic honors, as have nine individuals. On the track, his athletes have earned another eight All-Ivy nods, eight NCAA First Found qualifications, six USATF Junior qualifications, one USATF senior qualification, one NCAA Honorable-Mention All-America honor, five All-Time Ivy Top-Ten performances, and sixty-one Brown All-Time Top-Ten marks, including twelve program records. His track athletes have been a part of five All-Academic Track & Field teams and themselves earned seven individual USTFCCCA All-Academic nods. The 2015-2016 academic period proved a breakthrough year for his athletes. The fall season culminated with a third-place team finish at the NCAA Northeast Regional netting a tie for the final bid to the NCAA Championships and was the programs highest finish since an equal third-place in 2001. Sophomore Natalie Schudrowitz 18 (fourth-place overall) and Taylor Worthy 17 (nineteenth) earned All-Region honors, and freshman Carleen Jeffers 19 (twenty-sixth) joined them as USTFCCCA All-Academic recipients to lead the team to their fifth straight All-Academic award under Baker. Although ultimately losing the tiebreak for the final team spot, number-one runner Schudrowitz 18 qualified individually and ran to a twenty-third place finish at the NCAA Championships, strong enough for All-America honors and the highest finish for any Ivy League athlete. Jeffers 19, the top true-freshman at both the Ivy League and NCAA Regional meets, earned a place on the US Junior Under-20 Cross Country Team to Scotlands Great Bupa run in January 2016, the programs first recipient of that honor. The 2015-2016 indoor track & field season brought more fireworks from Schudrowitz 18 when she ran to a program record in the 3,000-meters (9:13.53, #8 Ivy All-Time) mid-season, a mark that qualified her to the USATF Senior Indoor Championships in Portland, Oregon, in March. Prior to racing in Portland, Schudrowitz 18 finished a hard-fought runner-up over 3,000-meters and ran to a title over 5,000-meters at the Ivy League Championships indoors, joining alumna Heidi Caldwell 14 (indoor 12, outdoor 12) as winners over that distance since Bakers arrival. Not to be outdone, the underclassmen quartet of Alexis Van Pernis 18, Jeanine Noordam 18, Clare Peabody 18, and Worthy 17 ran to an indoor Ivy title in the 4x800-meters, Peabody 18 scored third-place points over 1,000-meters (Ivy #8 All-Time), Jeffers 19 scored fifth and placed as the top freshman in the 5,000-meters, and Noordam scored sixth over 500-meters. During the 2016 outdoor season, Worthy 17 scored in the Ivy 800-meter final, the same indoor 4x800-meter squad secured a third-place finish, cross country number-six runner Megan Ratcliffe 18 ran to a fourth-place finish in the Ivy 10,000-meter race, Peabody 18 (1,500-meters) and Ratcliffe 18 (10,000-meters) earned bids to the NCAA First Round, and Jeffers 19 (5,000-meters) and fellow freshman Emma Sloan 19 (1,500-meters) earned bids to the USATF Junior Championships in California. In all, sixteen seasons-bests were added to Browns All-Time Top-Ten during the indoor and outdoor seasons, highlighted by three to the outdoor 1,500-meter list (Peabody 18, Worthy 17, and Van Pernis 18), bringing to five-out-of-ten the number of current or graduated athletes that count Baker as their coach from that one event list. As in the fall, three athletes earned USTFCCCA All-Academic recognition (Peabody 18, Ratcliffe 18, Schudrowitz 18) for their combination of academic and track and field performances, bringing the total to six awards for five recipients on the year. The rebuilding process that Baker started upon his arrival on College Hill in August 2011, and which reached new heights in 2015-2016, first showed progress at the 2012 Indoor and Outdoor Ivy League Championships where eventual five-time school-record setter Heidi Caldwell 14 ran to upset 5,000-meter titles at each meet, respectively. That same spring of 2012, Caldwells 14 teammate Olivia Mickle 13 raced to the 10,000-meter NCAA Finals, along the way setting the first of two new program standards over that distance, the second of which coming in 2013 with a 33:29.85, ranking her on the Ivy All-Time Top-Ten list at the time. The fall of 2012 saw Caldwell 14 (fourth place), Mickle 13 (fifth) and Margaret Connelly 14 (seventh) earn First-Team All-Ivy honors by virtue of each placing in the top-seven individuals, and Connelly 14 would rise to another level just a few short weeks later and finish seventh again, but this time at the NCAA Northeast Regional to land an individual bid to the NCAA Championships. In addition to the aforementioned exploits of Mickle 13, herself a four-time All-Ivy recipient, the ensuing years brought continued Brown, Ivy, NCAA and academic honors. Caldwell 14 led that charge (three cross-country All-Ivy and All-Region honors, five school records (both indoor and outdoors for 3,000-meters and 5,000-meters, the latter event twice), two NCAA First Round qualifications, and multiple Ivy and USTFCCCA academic honors) and helped attract and develop what is now the core of the student-athletes within the program. Lucy Van Kleunen 17 was one of the first to carry Caldwells legacy forward by grabbing Cross Country All-Region honors (twenty-first) in 2014 before teaming with newcomer Schudrowitz 18 to qualify through to the NCAA First Round in the steeplechase in the spring of 2015. Schudrowitzs 18 steeplechase run at the NCAA First Round (10:02.63, then #5 Ivy All-Time) just missed qualifying her to the NCAA Finals and US Senior Championships, but it was the fastest time in the NCAA for any true freshman, still sits number-six on the All-Time Ivy Record Book, and broke the school record of Anna Willard 06, the former American Record Holder for the event. Van Kleunen 17 (10:13.20) was right behind Schudrowitz 18 at both the Ivy and NCAA First Round, good enough for ninth fastest sophomore in the NCAA and just outside of the Ivy Top-Ten list at the time. Prior to arriving on College Hill, Baker spent four years from 2007-2011 as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Williams College, serving as a cross country assistant under his own college coach and many-time NCAA Coach of the Year, Peter Farwell, as well as the primary event coach for the mens and womens middle distances. He assisted teams that garnered seven finishes in the NCAA top-ten, eleven Division III New England Regional Championships, and eleven New England Small College Athletic Conference titles. As the day-to-day coach of the middle-distance events, ten student-athletes earned a total of twenty-two All-America awards. Of those awards, ten came by virtue of top-three NCAA finishes including the men's outdoor 5,000-meter champion in 2010 (Connor Kamm 10), who was later named USTFCCCA Outdoor Track Scholar Athlete of the Year. Another of his student-athletes (Macklin Chaffee 09) raced to runner-up NCAA Outdoor 1,500-meter finishes in consecutive years, was named NCAA New England Regional Athlete of the Year, and qualified for the 2009 USATF Senior Championships in Eugene, Oregon, with what was then the eighth fastest time in NCAA Division III history (3:44.71). In addition to the All-America performances, student-athletes from his group competed at the NCAA Championships eleven additional times, and fifteen more performances made the NCAA provisional or automatic cut. During the two fall seasons that Baker assisted Farwell, the mens and womens squads earned matching third-place NCAA finishes in 2008 and three athletes earned All-America honors. Academically, the teams garnered USTFCCCA Academic honors both years with the 2008 men's team earning National Academic Team of the Year. Encouraged by his mentors at Williams, Baker interrupted his four years coaching Williams and traveled to Kenya in the fall of 2009 to apprentice under Renato Canova, the former Head Track & Field Coach of Italy and Qatar, respectively, current Head Coach of China, and the IAAF International Lecturer on Endurance. Baker first coached at LaSalle Academy in Manhattan, New York, from 2005-2006 as a parallel pursuit to a career in architecture before transitioning full-time into education as a teacher and coach at Cardinal Hayes High School in the south Bronx from 2006-2007. During an undergraduate term at Stanford in 2003, Baker studied public art and found his first coaching mentor while shadowing Coach Frank Gagliano, the retired coach of Georgetown University, then of The Nike Farm Team in Palo Alto, California, and current coach of the New Jersey-New York Track Club. Also as a Williams student-athlete, Baker earned All-New England honors and competed three times at the NCAA Cross Country Championships with a high team-finish of fifth. As a collegiate senior, he served as cross country co-captain and received the program's endowed Plansky Award for leadership, citizenship and sportsmanship, and the Creem Award for loyalty, perseverance and desire during track & field. Along with his studies in Art Studio, he emphasized Art History and subsequently received upon graduation a fellowship in medieval archaeology to southern France. One of four children of Drs. Edward and Molly Baker of Macomb, Illinois, Baker competed in football, basketball, cross country and track & field for Macomb High School. In his personal life, Baker credits his parents as his greatest influences, and his wife, Kali Moody, as his greatest support. In addition to learning a diverse methodology for coaching the middle and long distances under Gagliano in California, Farwell at Williams, and Canova in Kenya, Baker has completed the USATF Level 1 Education School and achieved certification through the USTFCCCA Track and Field Academy for both Jumps Events Specialization and Strength & Conditioning, respectively.