SEATTLE – With a Pac-12 Championship and first Top-10 NCAA Outdoor finish in over forty years in hand, Andy Powell was named the USTFCCCA West Region Men’s Coach of the Year today. It’s the second year in a row Powell has won the outdoor honor, and he also won the 2023 West Region Indoor Coach of the Year award, making for three in a row on the track.
In his fifth season at Washington, Powell led the Huskies to their first top-10 finish at the NCAA Outdoor meet since 1979, as the Dawgs finished ninth, moving up from a 12th-place finish in 2022.
The Huskies had 13 entries to nationals on the men’s side, tied for the second-most in the NCAA.
Earlier this week, Washington finished No. 3 in the USTFCCCA Program of the Year rankings, which rates teams on their placings at all three NCAA Championships throughout the academic year. Washington was 14th at the cross country meet in the fall, then placed fourth at NCAA Indoors then ninth outdoors. The third-place finish is the highest for UW in the history of the rankings, which date to 2008-09.
Powell led UW to its first Pac-12 team title in history, with the meet in its current configuration going back to the Pac-8 in 1960. Washington set a program record with seven individual titles, including six by Powell’s distance group, which swept every distance event from the 800-meters up to the 10,000-meters, just the second time any team has achieved that feat. That earned Powell his first Pac-12 Men’s Coach of the Year honors.
Last week in Austin, Texas, Powell’s milers made more history, as Nathan Green and Joe Waskom went 1-2 in the NCAA 1,500-meters final. They were the first teammates to go 1-2 in the event since Oregon in 2010, which was coached by Powell at the time.
Green became the third different Husky to win an NCAA title in the 1,500m/Mile in the past three championships. The streak started with Waskom winning the 2022 outdoor 1,500m title, then Luke Houser winning the 2023 indoor mile title, and Green taking his turn in the 2023 outdoor 1,500-meters.
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