Project Lead: Prof. Sarah Burnell (Head Women’s Cross Country Coach)
Vivero Fellow (2025-2026): Olyvia Liu-Cai
Grinnell College’s cross country teams were established in 1920 (men) and 1974 (women); over the many decades since those inaugural years, the teams have grown and flexed with the broader societal culture of athletics around the world, in the United States, and within higher education. An independent research project in the spring of 2025 jump started the creation of a digital space to highlight the history of the cross country and track programs at Grinnell for students and alumni to learn from, and create a space for alumni to contribute their memories and photos from their own time on the team.
I would like this Vivero fellow to help me design a subsection of our team website (https://xctf.sites.grinnell.edu/) for this project and upload/add/present preliminary information like the women’s cross country team yearbooks, work with my class this fall to create different timelines that could toggle on an off for the different teams and one that shows a history timeline for athletics/running in general, create places for oral histories, photos, and memories. In essence, we want to create a place that alumni will come back to in order to reminisce and also learn about the history and story of the programs they participated in. These elements can be similar to the Multicultural Alumni Archive Yearbooks and the Georgia Dentel Timeline. I think it would be fun to have a “Share you memories” section, too. Additionally, the most recent former cross country and track coaches, Will and Evelyn Freeman, kept excellent documentation of almost all the seasons from the past few decades, and we have tons of photos, race results, etc. to add to this website. We also have an awesome article that John Kissane ’82 wrote for the Grinnell Magazine highlighting the early history of Grinnell’s running programs that we can highlight. This Vivero fellow will develop design skills, as well as collaboration and communication skills with students and alumni.
