After an impressive 37-year coaching career at St. Olaf College, Chris Daymont’s name is synonymous with running and women’s cross country both in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the state of Minnesota. Considered a pioneer of the sport, she has been a champion in her field, a leader for women in coaching, and a mentor to countless student-athletes over her years of service.  

Daymont grew up in New York in the 1950s when athletic opportunities for girls consisted of games with the other neighborhood kids. In high school she lettered in the only girls’ sport offered: cheerleading. She started at Hartwick College in 1970 and joined the basketball team, and from there her love of sport exploded. She loved being coached, and decided that after her collegiate basketball career was over, she’d become a women’s basketball coach.

That plan lasted until the early 1970s when Daymont’s parents sued the state of New York to get her younger sister, Katy, the right to compete with the Syracuse Chargers Track Club. They won, and that case was instrumental in mandating equal opportunities for girls under Title IX. Katy later recruited her older sister to compete on the team’s 4x100-meter relay team. That was Daymont’s first regulation race, and it turned her career trajectory upside down.

In 1973, Daymont transferred to SUNY-Cortland, and started training with the men’s indoor track team because there was no women’s equivalent. She competed in the hurdles, 400, 800, and pentathlon, and qualified for the AAU national meet in the 400. In 1975, she was part of America’s fastest two-mile relay team. After graduating with a double major in physical education and biology, Daymont started her master’s degree in exercise physiology at Syracuse, and took on a role as a grad assistant for the men’s track and field team. When the head coach was released in October 1975, 23-year-old Daymont found herself the head coach of a Division I men’s program.

Daymont served as the interim coach through Spring 1976, and didn’t apply for the head coaching role when it was posted. Instead, she was hired at St. Olaf College in Northfield, to teach PE methods and exercise physiology theory classes, coach women’s cross country and track, and serve as an assistant women’s basketball coach. 

In her first fall with the Ole women’s cross country team, Daymont had three runners. She convinced the team manager and her friend to compete so the team could score points at meets. The next year, 14 women came out, and by year three, she had 30 women on the team. In 1979 and 1980, Daymont’s fourth and fifth seasons with the Oles, her team won the Midwest Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women state title, placed in the top two at the AIAW Region VI Championships, and finished runner-up at the AIAW Division III National Championships.

Daymont left St. Olaf from 1981-86 to coach at Macalester and Bloomsburg State in Pennsylvania, but returned in Fall 1986 and picked up where she left off. From 1986 until her retirement in 2018, her cross country teams made 25 NCAA appearances, including 13 top-10 finishes, and recorded 26 top-three MIAC finishes and nine conference titles.

Daymont, a two-time MIAC Coach of the Year, three-time NCAA Division III Central Region Coach of the Year, 2014 U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches’ Association Hall of Fame honoree and 2013 St. Olaf Athletics Hall of Fame inductee, also coached the Oles’ women’s track and field team until 2010. Her cross country and track and field student-athletes combined for a total of 81 All-American honors, including two individual national champions.

She mentored more than 1,000 female athletes in her tenure, and helped grow cross country both at St. Olaf and across Minnesota. She has served as a distance and middle-distance clinician around the region, and meet director for MIAC and NCAA National Track and Field Championships hosted by St. Olaf. Daymont and her husband, Dick, have directed countless local running events.

Coaching runners may not have been on her radar when she went to college, but a crash course in running and coaching in college proved to be all the push Daymont needed to fall in love with a sport she would spend her lifetime growing and transforming for girls and women across Minnesota.