Colorado head coach Mark Wetmore enters his 18th season at Colorado, his 15th as the head coach, as the only Division I cross country coach to win all four NCAA titles - men’s and women’s team and men’s and women’s individual- at the same school.

His women’s team won the team championship at Iowa State in 2000, while his men’s team won the following year at Furman. He has coached Adam Goucher (1998), Jorge Torres (2002) and Dathan Ritzenhein (2003) to men’s individual titles, while Kara Grgas-Wheeler won the 2000 women’s crown. His men’s and women’s teams became just the fourth in championship history to sweep the team titles, doing so in 2004. In 2006, his men’s team came through again in muddy conditions to win his fifth team championship. He has earned the honor of being the NCAA Women’s Coach of the Year twice (‘00 and ‘04) and the NCAA Men’s Coach of the Year once (‘06).

Wetmore’s coaching career began immediately after high school, with a municipal junior track club called the Mine Mountain Road Department. From there, he coached a TAC team while simultaneously coaching distance runners at his prep alma mater, Bernards. Wetmore served a four-year stint at Seton Hall from 1988-1991 where he was an assistant coach for the men’s and women’s distance programs and as a member of the academic support staff. In August of 1991 he moved to Boulder and took a volunteer position in ’92.

He was promoted from volunteer to part-time assistant in 1994, and assumed head coaching responsibilities two weeks prior to the 1995 NCAA Cross Country Championships in Ames, Iowa, where the CU men finished just off the podium in fourth, the women fifth with both combining for eight All-American performances.

All told nine of Wetmore’s athletes — Adam Goucher, Alan Culpepper, Sara (Gorton) Slattery, Kara Grgas-Wheeler, Jodie Hughes, Jorge Torres, Dathan Ritzenhein, Renee Metivier and Jenny Barringer— have combined for 18 NCAA individual cross country, indoor and outdoor championships. Barringer was the first CU collegian to win a USA Track and Field crown in 2007 in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and she did so again in 2009. Barringer placed fifth at the IAAF World Championships in 2009 and set the American record in the steeplechase at 9:12.50, breaking her former record by almost 10 seconds.

His men’s teams have won 12 Big 12 Conference titles, while his women’s teams have won 11 of the last 13 titles. Wetmore has earned the conference coach of the year honor 19 times in cross country, as well as 12 region coach of the year honors.

He has tutored 15 individual conference champions, 13 regional title winners and 79 All-Americans while six CU runners have been crowned USA Cross Country Champions, including Billy Nelson in 2003, Pete Janson in ‘04 and Liza Pasciuto in ‘05. Three former student-athletes, Goucher, Shayne (Wille) Culpepper and Alan Culpepper, represented the United States at the 2000 Olympic Games while Ritzenhein joined the Culpeppers in ‘04 . In 2008, three more former athletes made the Olympic team, Kara Goucher, Billy Nelson and Jorge Torres. Current CU harrier Jenny Barringer also made the team and was one of six U.S. track team members to come back to college the following fall. Over two dozen Buff distance alumni have signed professional running contracts; 14 are still competing.

After sending 17 of his current and former athletes to the IAAF World Cross Country Championships since 1992, USA Track & Field named Wetmore to the coaching staff for the USA National Team that competed at the 2004 Championships in Brussels, Belgium . He coached the junior men’s team to a seventh-place finish, paced by future Buff Ryan Deak.

A native of Bernardsville, N.J., Charles Mark Wetmore graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Education from Rutgers in 1978 before receiving his master’s in movement sciences from Columbia in 1988. He lives in the mountains west of Boulder.