BLOOMINGTON, Minn. – When the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) handed out its annual awards for women's cross country, Carleton College head coach Donna Ricks received the conference's top coaching honor for the second consecutive year. She has now taken home 8-of the last-10 MIAC Women's Cross Country Coach of the Year awards, giving her 13 in her career.
 
Ricks, who is in her 31st year at Carleton, is the only coach in MIAC women's cross country history to be honored with double-digit Coach of the Year selections.
 
The award comes on the heels of Ricks guiding the Knights to a repeat conference title in 2023, as Carleton placed three runners among the meet's top-five finishers and seven in the top-15. This was the Knights' 13th MIAC title, and Carleton has won 8-of the last-10 conference championships.
 
She led the Knights to the 2013-2014-2015 MIAC titles, becoming only the third coach to lead a team to back-to-back-back conference titles. She then accomplished the feat again with team titles in 2017-2018-2019. Ricks and the Knights are two thirds of the way to matching that performance, having won in 2022 and now 2023.
 
Ricks has also been tabbed MIAC Coach of the Year once for both indoor track & field (2012) and outdoor track & field (2018).
 
Seven Knights—Hannah Preisser (2nd), Phoebe Ward (3rd), Helen Cross (4th), Sophie McManus (7th), Aliya Larsen (9th), Mary Blanchard (10th), and Libby Rowland (14th)—were recognized as part of the 2023 MIAC Women's Cross Country All-Conference team. This is only the second time since the MIAC began recording cross country all-conference awards on the conference website in 1995 that a school had seven runners take home Al-MIAC status. The other time was Carleton in 2017.
 
Ward and Rowland are three-time all-conference honorees, a feat achieved by just 48 women in MIAC cross country history.