EUGENE, Ore. – Northwest Christian University Head Cross Country and Distance Track Coach Heike McNeil has announced that she will step down from her coaching position at the end of the cross country season in November. She will leave behind an exceptional legacy at the helm of the program for over 12 years.
 
Coach McNeil said, "As I have been striving towards a proper work/life balance, I realized I needed to eventually make a decision and choose between teaching and coaching, but I put it off because I knew it would be a very difficult decision to make. Ultimately what tipped the scale was being able to spend more time with my husband.
 
"This wasn't an easy decision. I am going to deeply miss my athletes and being a part of their daily lives. I will also miss the challenge. Being a tiny school competing against giants like the University of British Columbia was a huge challenge and I enjoyed every bit of it."
 
McNeil originally came to NCU in 2004 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and quickly established a successful running club on campus. That club evolved into the varsity program which began official competition in 2006 as NCU launched membership in the NAIA and Cascade Collegiate Conference.
 
At 12 seasons, she is currently the longest tenured coach at NCU and will go down as the longest tenured female coach in Northwest Christian University history.
 
McNeil has developed NCU into one of the premier distance running programs in the NAIA. Her teams have consistently been ranked in the top-25 nationally and since 2011 at least one gender has qualified for seven straight NAIA National Championships. McNeil was the architect for NCU's first Cascade Collegiate Conference Championship in any sport, winning the 2014 title. It was the first of three straight for the Beacons. In 2015, NCU rolled to the NAIA National Championship, also the first ever for the school. 
 
Athletic Director Corey Anderson said, "What Coach McNeil has accomplished here at NCU, building and sustaining success, is nothing short of amazing. This was accomplished because of Heike's leadership and knowledge along with the hard work of her Assistant, Dan Jackson, in the areas of training and recruiting. The team reached the pinnacle of the sport in 2015 with the national championship, but the foundational success of her programs have been evident with strong conference and national results before and after this accomplishment. 
 
"NCU's cross country and distance teams have always represented Heike's foundation of hard work, determination and sportsmanship while always displaying their Christian faith in the community and in competition. The respect and admiration that our distance running program has from a conference and national level is unprecedented during this 'NAIA Era' of Beacon Athletics."
 
McNeil has been at the forefront of holistic coaching, representing NCU's "Tri-Athlete" model. Michael Fuller, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Development said, "Heike has built a program with a culture that is the epitome of what we strive to build and achieve at NCU.  Her program is Christ-centered with a focus on academic success, strong character, and both team and individual results."
 
McNeil's career has included numerous honors and accolades, none larger than the 2015 NAIA Women's Cross Country National Championship team that she helped build. She has won three CCC Championships, three CCC Coach of the Year honors and was the 2015 NAIA National Coach of the Year.
 
McNeil has coached 59 All-Conference performers, 11 CCC Individual Champions and 30 All-Americans. With strength in the classroom equal to their strength on the course, McNeil's teams have garnered countless Academic All-Conference selections along with more than 60 NAIA-Daktronics Scholar Athletes. Her teams have also collected over 20 NAIA Scholar-Team awards since 2009.
 
In 2017 and 2018, Michelle Fletcher and Rosa Schmidt respectively became the first two student-athletes in school history to be named the winner of the Kendall Burke Award, given at graduation each spring to the top scholar at Northwest Christian University.
 
Fletcher, a three-time All-American and the 2016 CCC Champion in the Steeplechase, said, "The environment that Coach Heike fostered was one that enabled me to experience transformational growth in all aspects of my life. Heike has definitely refined what it means to develop athletes with the Tri-Athlete Model, and athletes that leave her program come away with significant academic, athletic, and spiritual growth."
 
One of the hallmarks of her career has been the physical development of her student-athletes. There are countless examples of athletes that came into the program with raw talent and became truly athletic and competitive runners by their senior year. "Heike has the uncanny ability to get the very most out of her student-athletes," said Fuller, "meeting each of them where they are at, making them better runners, better students and better people. My favorite moments over the years have been watching Heike take very determined and gritty runners who maybe have been raw in their skills and abilities, and helping them take this grit and determination to become amazing runners.  I have seen her do this over and over again, which is an indication of what a talented coach she is."
 
The mentorship Coach McNeil has provided is not something that Northwest Christian University will lose as she departs leadership from the running program. Fuller said, "Heike led NCU to our first NAIA National Championship and multiple conference championships, but her most significant impact has been on the dozens of students that she has mentored and made better. While we will be losing Heike as a coach, we will not be losing her in the classroom, where she will continue to thrive, growing our Exercise Science Program and helping students unpack the call that God has for them in their lives.  We are blessed to have an employee like Heike at NCU."

NCU is expected to make an announcement about future leadership on Friday.



Heike McNeil, In Her Own Words:
 
On Her Decision to Resign:
In short, I feel like I was trying to do too many things at the same time. I am introverted by nature so when I took the coaching position in 2006 I had this little argument with God about how I would be able to handle teaching and being around my students all day and then coach and travel with my athletes. He obviously won the argument and I decided to give it a shot. 
 
When I was hired, we were just a Cross Country team. I knew we would need to add Distance Track to be able to have runners compete year round and coach them consistently. Once the track team grew, we started going to more meets, many of them multiple day meets and I found myself in this crazy cycle of coming home late and exhausted on Saturdays and then having to catch up on school stuff and writing lectures all Sunday.
 
Somehow it all worked out, but I don't know if it was getting harder because I am getting older or because I just felt like I couldn't do everything I wanted to do for either one of my jobs. There simply weren't enough hours in the day. I knew that NCU's exercise science program has a lot of room to grow and develop into a top program by adding research and other components - and now I feel like I might be able to give it justice.
 
I realized I needed to eventually make a decision and choose between teaching and coaching, but I put it off because I knew it would be a very difficult decision to make. Ultimately, what tipped the scale was being able to spend more time with my husband. Finding a work/family life balance is challenging when you are in season 9 months out of the year and it's extremely difficult when you are married to a fire captain who works a 24 hour shift schedule. When my husband worked Sunday shifts, I often didn't really see him for a whole week.    
 
This wasn't an easy decision. This transition is going to be tough. If the reward wasn't amazing, all the sacrifices would have never been worth it - but they were - for all 13 years of it.  
 
On What Coaching Has Meant to Her:
When I was hired in 2006, I'd had very limited coaching experience. I had worked as a personal trainer and coached some individuals for running, cycling and triathlon events. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. There definitely was a lot of learning involved. Some things were more difficult than I had expected, others were easier.
 
I came to this job from the opposite end than most coaches do. Most coaches learn exercise physiology as they go and find that to push your athletes to the next level it becomes a necessity to understand the scientific principles behind human performance. On the flipside, I have always loved these scientific principles and they are what made me interested in coaching in the first place.
 
I wanted this coaching experience to be a giant science experiment, like a big human performance study and a way to find the best method to achieve maximum performance. I was very well aware that every individual would be different and I wanted to learn how athletes respond differently to the workloads imposed.
 
I never in a million years could have guessed all the other things I learned on top of the physiological factors. I learned to love my athletes. I learned that you have to truly care about an athlete as a whole person - so that you can understand what makes them tick, what motivates them and how to empower them to dig deeper, to embrace the pain and to perform to the best of their ability. I found that coaching really just has one principle: Love your Athletes.
 
Coaching in college is walking alongside young people as they are going through a critical stage of life. It is being there for them when they need something, fielding phone calls about what they should eat for dinner, helping them with decisions about their classes, their relationship with Christ and their relationships with other people, communication with their parents and so much more.
 
It is about teaching them discipline and showing them that hard work pays off, in running and also in life. It is about learning life lessons together with your athletes as they all have their own unique experiences. I learned something new from each individual I coached in the past 13 years. When you love your athletes, powerful things happen. They begin to trust you and they start seeing the beautiful gift of running God has given them and they see that you can help them use this gift to their full potential. When you believe in an athlete and show them that you do, they will be able to reach new levels and gain confidence for life. 
 
That is where all the exercise physiology and the scientific part of human performance comes back into play. I think my favorite part of coaching is truly developing an athlete; building them up step-by-step, no matter where they started when they graduated from high school, and transform them into confident competitors. When you get your athletes to realize that it doesn't matter how much talent they have, if they work hard they will be able to perform to the best of THEIR personal potential. Then you have the start of a successful team that will not only hold each other accountable but also be there to support each other. Being a part of that is magical and a huge privilege.      
 
On Her Favorite Memories
There are so many memories. Of course I will never forget winning the national title in 2015, but truthfully memories are made every day. My favorite moments are always when an athlete has a huge breakthrough which for most of them happens around sophomore year or so. Then there are memories of athletes accepting Christ and being baptized, athletes on the team getting married and so many more. To be honest it is hard to sort through and find favorites. It has just been a rich experience and I am so very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with some really awesome athletes. 
 
On What She is Going to Miss
I am going to miss my athletes. I know this is what I need to do and I know that as I transition, my athletes will as well and they need to. But, the thought of not being a part of these athletes' lives anymore brings tears to my eyes. These are people that I've communicated with almost daily for up to 3.5 years so it is going to be hard. 
 
I will miss the challenge. Being a tiny school competing against giants such as the University of British Columbia presented a huge challenge for me, and I enjoyed every bit of it. The stronger the other teams the better. It pushed us to perform at even higher levels. It challenged me to sit down and design a set of workouts and tweaks to the program that would get us ahead of or closer to our competitors. 
 
I have a couple of sponsors to race my mountain bike, so hopefully I can challenge myself physically that way. I have some new challenging classes to teach that I am excited about but the building of relationships with athletes will most likely not be replaceable.