Drive into Raleigh on I-440 West, and shortly before the Wade Avenue exit, you’ll see a sign that reads, “NC State Wolfpack 2023 Women’s Cross Country National Champions.” While a nice tribute to the team’s success, it doesn’t paint the full picture. The women’s cross country team also won the national championship in 2021, 2022 and 2025. “We’ve won four of the last five years,” says Rollie Geiger, senior associate director of track and field and cross country. “Who does that?!” NC State does, with a program led by Laurie Henes ’92. “There’s several reasons you win national championships,” Geiger says. “You start with Laurie, but then there’s a whole list after that.” That list is extensive, and as Henes says, when you’re competing at such a high level, “there are no small things.” 

Henes, now director and head coach of men’s and women’s track and field and cross country, has been managing that list for the Wolfpack for more than 30 years, first as a national-champion student-athlete, then as a member of the coaching staff. “I recruited her,” Geiger says proudly, and he shares that it was a “challenging” process to secure the Boardman, Ohio, native because “every program in the country was trying to convince her to attend their university.” 

Henes, a daughter of an athlete and a teacher, was as good a student as she was distance runner. Her family, she says, encouraged her to consider schools like Stanford and Harvard. “And I did,” she says. “I visited Stanford, . . . I just didn’t feel like I fit in particularly well at some of those places.” Henes wanted a university that would challenge her academically while also helping her develop as a runner. 

And she surely found that at NC State, where she had a storied career winning the 5,000-meter NCAA championship in 1991 in Eugene, Ore., during the last race of her senior year. She went on to a professional career that included competing at the World Athletics Championships and Olympic trials. She nearly made the 1996 Olympic team, too, placing fifth in the 10,000-meter. (The top three winners make the Olympic team.) After Olympic trials, Henes stepped back from professional running. She and her husband, Bob Henes ’91 (also a legendary NC State track and field athlete), wanted to start a family. She accepted an assistant coaching position for women’s cross country with the Wolfpack, and she and Bob welcomed children Elly Henes ’20 and Jordan Henes a few years later.

“I don’t think … when I finished my professional career, I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I’ll coach here for 30 years,’ ” Henes says. “The idea that I could make that decision and end up in the same place the whole time — that hardly ever happens. … I’m really grateful to have been able to do that,” she says.

Henes hasn’t just done it. She’s done it extraordinarily well. Along with the four NCAA titles, Henes has led the team to 10 ACC trophies and has won many national and regional coach of the year awards. In 2025, she was named ACC women’s cross country coach of the year for the 10th time, setting an ACC record. She’s coached 29 All-Americans and 78 All-ACC athletes. Take a glance around the suite of offices that’s home to the cross country and track and field programs, and you’ll see trophies everywhere: on shelves, desks, side tables, even the floor. There’s also a display case in the hall. They’ve run out of room to put them all. “That’s not a bad problem,” Geiger says. But he concedes that it is, indeed, a problem. “What are we going to do?” he adds with a laugh. “We’re still going to win.” 

‘Coaching Is Teaching’

“A lot of my family were educators,” Henes says. Though she decided that high school teaching wasn’t for her, she ended up in a teaching role, being named head coach of the women’s cross country program in 2006. “Coaching is teaching,” says Geiger. “As athletes, you’re spending more time with your coach at practice than you are in the classroom with your professors,” says Hannah Steelman ’21, who ran cross country and track with the Wolfpack for two seasons and continued to train with Henes professionally after graduation. 

“There are a lot of things that Coach Henes has taught me to bring to the table in life when it comes to relationships, friendships . . . she’s very good at fostering and stewarding those,” says Steelman, adding, “I learned to believe in myself beyond what I thought I was capable of before coming to NC State.”

“I learned to believe in myself
beyond what I thought I was capable
of before coming to NC State.”
— Hannah Steelman ’21

Though Henes wants athletes to win regional and national championships, this confidence boost is her ultimate aim. “I’ve seen so many of our women do things that they just didn’t think were going to be possible when they got here, and so I think that’s the biggest thing that I would hope that through their time here they could see,” she says. 

Julia Lucas ’07, who returned to Raleigh after graduation to train with Henes as she made her own bid for the Olympic team, says Henes has long employed a strategy of kindness and respect that was “ahead of her time.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, Lucas explains, “[T]here was an idea that excellence had to be coupled with brutal training measures.” She says many coaches “barked at their athletes, and punishment was a part of training. Emotions weren’t welcome on the track.” But Henes — then and now — employs a different strategy. “She thinks that an athlete who is happy and healthy and confident will run fast because of those facts,” Lucas says. The athlete “isn’t trying to run fast in order to become happy and healthy and confident. The order is flipped from some other programs.”

Lucas coaches large groups of runners now, many of whom are using running as a way to process personal difficulties like the loss of a loved one or divorce. “My way of engaging with those athletes is informed by my time with Laurie,” Lucas says. “She is my singular model.”

Like the best educators who inadvertently inspire their students to become teachers, Henes has led many athletes who’ve gone on to become coaches. Her approach of “assumed kindness,” as Lucas calls it, continues to inspire. “I would love to be a coach one day,” says Angelina Napoleon, a senior cross country and track and field athlete. “The dream, dream job would be to come back to NC State and coach here,” she says.

‘Trust the Process’

While other programs look to recruiting services or depend on bringing in transfer students or athletes who are already at their peak, Henes’ approach is simple: She’s looking for student-athletes who will thrive in a team environment and develop over their college career. Henes admits that her approach isn’t for everyone, and training with so many high-achieving athletes can overwhelm someone who is used to being the best. “Nobody who was really good in high school comes here and doesn’t want to be good,” she says.

Napoleon says that she trained by herself in high school and never felt the need to have a team around her. But now, she says, “after being in a team, I couldn’t see my situation any different. I 100% thrive off of the women around me, and they push me every day, and I hope I do the same for them.” 

Lucas wasn’t seeking a team environment, either, when she arrived on campus in 2003. But Henes’ respect and care for her athletes were evident through her weekly recruitment phone calls, which Lucas says attracted her more than the team-based approach. “I think, at 17, I was like a hotshot who wanted to be the fastest person in the world. I wasn’t thinking so deliberately about team,” she says. But Henes saw through that front. “Laurie’s great about figuring out those athletes who fit the program,” Geiger says. Lucas puts it a little differently, “She’s a real, like, whisperer.” 

Part of that whispering is patience. There are steps in athletic development, and Henes says one of the biggest challenges of her job is to convince young athletes to “trust the process” and not push themselves too hard or too quickly: “You can’t just come in and microwave your fitness, as my daughter likes to say.”

‘The Most Genuine, Obvious Thing’

Geiger describes the scene outside of Henes’ office like that of a busy bakery: You take a number and wait in line. This aligns with how Lucas thinks of Henes. “She just has so much time and energy for so many athletes over generations,” she says. “The only way to keep that up is to really love what you’re doing and for it to be just the most genuine, obvious thing.”

Henes admits it’s a cliché, but one of her guiding principles is, “They don’t care what you know until they know how much you care.” She offers many mantras and motivational sayings to her athletes, but this one seems to be primarily for herself. And her athletes feel its effects.

“I could always tell, and I can still tell to this day, that Coach Henes cares about my life — like me as a person outside of running — and I know that it’s the same for other women that she’s coached,” says Steelman. This feeling, of not just being, as Steelman puts it, “an asset to the team,” began before she was even officially part of the Wolfpack. 

Beginning her collegiate running career at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., Steelman competed against NC State at ACC tournaments, including in 2019, when she and Henes’ daughter Elly raced each other, both qualifying for nationals. Steelman says it was Henes who delivered the news to them, and they celebrated together. “Looking back,” she says, “that’s super special, because that ended up being my coach, and Elly is one of my best friends. She’s literally a bridesmaid in my wedding.” And Henes is hosting the bridal shower.

Henes says that when students go away to college, “[T]his becomes their family away from home.” She wants the cross country and track and field program to provide a family atmosphere that protects and develops student-athletes. “That’s very important to me,” she says. “And I think, as I had children, and they went away, it was kind of like, ‘I hope somebody does that for them.’ ”

As it turned out, with Henes’ firstborn, that wasn’t necessary. Elly chose NC State, and in a pattern remarkably similar to Henes’, competed in cross country and track and field. She even won the same national title, in the same Hayward Field stadium, also in the final race of her senior year. “That day in that stadium,” Geiger says, “I started crying because of the mom-daughter situation. For anybody to win a national title . . . now your son or daughter’s winning the national title in the same stadium you did? It is just like, is this really happening?”

‘Pressure Is a Privilege’ 

Things athletes need to pay attention to in order to succeed, according to Henes (an incomplete list): training, nutrition, sleep, mindset, hydration, supplements, bloodwork, fun.

That last item may be surprising. “You have to work really hard and do things right to have the result you want,” Henes says. “It’s important in sports. It’s important in life too.” But that doesn’t mean that working hard can’t be fun. “It was such childlike, sweet fun,” says Lucas, “the van, the back of the bus coming home from a good meet, being so proud walking through the airport in our matching team uniforms, and having a million inside jokes with your teammates.” 

“NCAA track and field and cross country is not for the weak. It is very difficult. There is a lot of competition, and it can be very draining at times,” says Napoleon, who also adds that it’s a “lifestyle” and a “job.” “We like to keep it light as much as possible to distract from the reality of it being so competitive and so intense.”

How else do you handle the pressure of living up to the expectations of such a legendary program? Henes reminds athletes, “You’re not defending anything.” Each year is a new title, a new championship. “No one’s going to come and take that national championship trophy away. . . . You have to go try to win another one,” she says. But with social media, rankings and projections, it can be hard not to fixate on another athlete’s training plan, a competitor’s recent time or an NIL deal. “You have to kind of just tune out all of that noise,” Henes says. “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
— Laurie Henes ’92

Katelyn Tuohy ’23, a four-time NCAA individual champion and now-professional runner with Adidas, says that Henes tells athletes, “Pressure is a privilege”: It’s a privilege to be in a position where people expect great things from you. At the 2023 cross country nationals, where they’d won the past two years and were expected to win again, Tuohy says, “[T]hings just went downhill.” One of the top runners was injured and couldn’t compete. Tuohy ran while sick. And Henes had to fill a good portion of the lineup with freshmen, who, though solid athletes, weren’t very experienced. “It was just a very high-stress situation,” Tuohy says. “I know [Coach Henes] was probably freaking out, but she just stayed so composed. She knows what to say to which person, because she knows her athletes so well.” That composure paid off. They won the team national title — again.

‘Everybody Gets the Ring’ 

Talk to any past or current NC State cross country or track and field athlete or coach, and you’ll hear more talk of “the program” than “the team.” “The program” is a shorthand for all the sports under Henes’ leadership but also an acknowledgment of the significance of everyone — past, present and future — involved. “I feel as though we are just such a tiny piece in what is NC State cross country,” says Napoleon. “We carry a national title, we carry world qualifiers on our team, and NCAA championships, and All-Americans. We carry that with us right now, but that still feels very tiny in what is the program. We would not be at all where we are today … without every single person before us.” 

This inclusive thinking pervades the program. Only seven women can line up to race at cross country nationals, and with 17 on the roster, most of the athletes have a supporting role at the championship. But, as Henes says, “When we get a ring for nationals, everybody gets the ring.” So much of the program isn’t about the races. It’s about the process of learning to be successful. 

Napoleon says that Henes “has built a dynasty, and she will continue to build a dynasty, because that is what our program is about. We’re not about bringing in talent, we’re about building talent, building success and building greatness.” 

Henes is a perfect example, starting as a freshman athlete in 1988, running professionally, joining the coaching staff in 1992 and, in 2023, being named director and head coach of men’s and women’s track and field and cross country. She is the first woman in NC State history to direct a men’s athletic program. Henes acknowledges that “it’s important for both genders in our team to see that a female can be in charge,” but Tuohy says Henes handled this accomplishment like she does so many of her own: with humility. “She didn’t even want to tell us!” Tuohy says. “Coach Geiger had to announce it … She just wanted to keep doing her thing.”

Just as she advises the athletes, Henes tries to ignore others’ expectations. Recognitions like coach of the year and promotion to program director could bring added pressure to continue to produce results. But the only pressure Henes admits is to help the athletes. “I do feel a responsibility to make sure that I’m doing as good a job for each group of women in the program that are coming through as I’ve done before,” she says. “I don’t want to ever be doing it and not putting in the same amount of effort or passion that I did the first time we won when we’re trying to win for a fifth time.”

Ultimately, though, her sense of accomplishment doesn’t come from winning. It’s from “relationships and seeing people succeed,” she says. “That’s where I get worth from what I’m doing.”

“Coaching is not about just the wins. It’s so much more important to see Laurie and those athletes graduate from this program and then be successful.”
— Rollie Geiger

Geiger reflects on his time working with Henes, helping her develop from a star athlete to a star coach. “Coaching is not about just the wins,” he says. “It’s so much more important to see Laurie and those athletes graduate from this program and then be successful.” NCAA titles are great, he says, but it’s relationships, being “a good parent or a good aunt,” and having a fulfilling career that truly matter — something Henes has clearly achieved. “The other stuff,” Geiger says, “is just trophies. Trophies you don’t know where to put.”

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