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 58 of the 78 Centennial cross country, indoor, and outdoor track & field titles since the advent of that conference.
Haverford boasts 174 cross country and track & field All-Americans since 1978, including 30 individual champions and a championship relay team. The Fords’ top seven all-time milers average 4:01, headed by nine-time NCAA 800 and 1,500 champion Karl Paranya '97, who became the first Division III runner ever to run a sub-4 mile (3:57.6) as a senior. He was later joined by Charlie Marquardt (3:55.97) who achieved his sub-4 mile at the 2018 Sir Walter Miler shortly after his graduation from the College. Haverford has had five runners in the U.S. Olympic trials -- Paranya (1,500 in 1996 and 2000), five-time NCAA champ Seamus McElligott ’91 (10,000 in 1992), Liam O'Neill ’85 (1,500 in 1988), and Bobby Cannon ’08 (marathon) -- and nearly had a sixth in three-time Division III champion, NCAA Postgraduate Scholar, and NCAA Division III Hall of Famer 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 three decades later - as the meet record.
In addition to Paranya, McElligott, and Foley, other national champions include JB Haglund '02 (four titles; cross country, DMR, 5,000 and 10,000), Matt Leighninger '92 (1,500 and steeplechase), Christopher Stadler '14 (two-time NCAA Champion in 5,000), Aaron Curry '94 (1,500), Anders Hulleberg '11 (cross country), and Dylan Gearinger ’19 (3,000). Greg Morgan became the most recent addition to that exclusive club when he won the 3,000 meter race during the indoor championships of his senior season.
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 1912, 1920 and 1924 games. Winning the silver medal in the 1,500m in 1920, Baker later captained Great Britian's 1924 "Chariots of Fire" Olympic team and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1958. 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 Mondo-surface oval, 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 four decades.