FINISH LINE With multiple records, Northwest senior athlete focuses on winning

WESLEY MILLER Sports Editor | @WesleyMiller360

A Maryville afternoon light shines through the windows of the Carl and Cheryl Hughes Fieldhouse. The orange hue of the track inside is saturated as athletes from multiple sports walk on its surface.

While Northwest track and field and cross country senior Caroline Cunningham is one of them, she might be more used to running on the track.

“I’d say I enjoyed competition starting in eighth grade and wanting to be good, which is why I trained,” Cunningham said. “When I got to college, it was, you know, I enjoy this for the sake of the activity and not just the competitions.”

From junior high school in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to her fifth year at Northwest, Cunningham has nearly devoted her life to running. She said she loves to run all the time.

She said she was always active as a kid. She did gymnastics, swimming and karate, but running became her focus soon after junior high. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the morning, in the evening, competitively or casually, she wants to run.

Through the years of training and running, Cunningham’s work has paid off for one of the best careers of anyone to walk on the Hughes Fieldhouse track. As of Feb. 22, Cunningham owns six individual long-distance track — three indoor and three outdoor — program records and is part of the best 4x400-meter relay finish in Northwest history. She also owns both cross country program records.

“It’s really special because it’s all of my hard work paying off,” Cunningham said. “I never want to talk badly about my ability level. I was a solid freshman, but nothing about me said, ‘Oh yeah, she’ll be a national qualifier or set all the school records.’

So, it’s been five years of showing up for workouts, showing up for my easy runs, getting out the door when I need to, recovering when I need to and to put five years into that and to have it show my name at the top of the lists is really neat and exciting.”

She’s not done yet, though. Cunningham will soon be one of Northwest’s athletes headed to the MIAA Indoor Championships Feb. 24-26 in Pittsburg, Kansas. In the past two seasons, she’s competed in five events at the conference championships and finished in the top five all but once.

Despite all the personal achievements and records, that’s not what she’s focused on. She said the conference meets, the national championships and her teams doing well are what’s important. To her track coach Brandon Masters, that’s no surprise.

“I don’t think Caroline really cares about any of the times or records,” Masters said. “I think her desire to win and to have her do it is paramount.”

“I definitely have workouts that halfway through it’s like, ‘I want to drop out’ and my motivator in those moments, a lot of times, are, you know, ‘OK, I want to get to nationals, and I want to do well,’” Cunningham said. “I know it’s gonna hurt when I get there and when I’m in the race, so I use that as motivation to continue pushing through fatigue and exhaustion during workouts and races.”

Before she ever competed in the conference championships or set her first record, Cunningham competed in cross country and track for Cedar Falls. She said she wanted to compete at the collegiate level throughout high school, but she didn’t feel good enough for Division I. With a low number of Division II schools in Iowa, she said she began looking out of state. She said the green and white caught her attention with a few different things, including the marine biology program, before she changed her major to psychology with a minor in child and family studies.

“When I came, I just loved the campus, and I loved the town,” Cunningham said with a smile. “It was one of those visits where I walked away like, ‘Yeah, this is where I’m gonna end up.”

Cross country and track assistant coach Wick Cunningham, who is also Caroline Cunningham’s husband, said it’s great to see her achieve all that she has. He said it’s great to be there for her, but it can be hard.

“You know, take the coach part out of it, it’s fun watching my wife reach a lot of her goals,” Wick Cunningham said. “It’s also very challenging to see her when she doesn’t reach those goals as a husband and even as a coach. We got to kind of make those hard lines of a husband-wife and coach-athlete relationship, and especially when we’re out in public. I’m not going to say we’re perfect, but I think we’re pretty dang good.”

Caroline Cunningham and her husband are approaching the end of that challenge, however. With the conference championships coming up, Caroline Cunningham’s indoor career is nearly over with only nationals after. When the indoor season concludes, she’ll shift her focus to her final outdoor season at Northwest.

She said she still has plenty of goals she wants to reach, including being named an All-American. Perhaps her biggest goal though, she said, was the desire to keep her enjoyment in her competitions.

“Have fun with it,” Caroline Cunningham said. “Remember your worth is not tied to however you perform. So, a bad race or a bad game is not who you are. It’s just something you do. That’s good advice for everyone. I still remind myself I like to run, but I’m not a runner. I am not the sport. I am not cross country. I am someone who runs cross country.”