University of Notre Dame · Prototypes for Humanity
National Running Club Database
Fair performance data for every collegiate club runner
Built by the Notre Dame Running Club so collegiate club runners finally have the shared results website NCAA Division I programs always had, plus advanced analytics those programs still do not. Live today for 190 U.S. college clubs in 39 states, with open science anyone can reproduce.
How collaboration changes culture
Before there was a national database, there was one club that refused to stay average. Campus culture at the University of Notre Dame Running Club is why NRCD exists: shared training, shared standards, and the belief that club runners deserve infrastructure worth racing for.
Around 2020, athletes at Notre Dame looked outward to clubs like the University of Michigan Running Club, whose public presence made expectations clear, while Notre Dame’s own site lagged. The fix was never only a better webpage. Notre Dame had to embrace team culture: train together, stick together, and treat club racing as a community with standards, not a collection of individuals who happen to wear the same kit.
Notre Dame Running Club
These milestones are for one campus club. The national platform numbers appear later under Reach.
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5 → 11
ND officers, 2022 to 2026
A wider board, including roles such as sprint coordinator, so practice quality and event coverage scaled with the roster.
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2 → 25
ND All-Americans through 2020 vs spring 2026
Honors that used to feel rare became the product of shared training, better meets, and belief that the club belonged on the national stage.
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2022
ND starts varsity-team meets
Notre Dame Running Club began competing at varsity team meets, raising the bar for preparation instead of waiting only for club-only calendars.
From “every four years” to expected
The old line was that Notre Dame might reach nationals once every four years. Through culture, that shrug disappeared. Qualifying stopped being a pleasant surprise and became something the team planned for together: workouts, travel, and accountability that treat the podium as the default ambition, not a coin flip.
Results follow the culture
Stronger practice design, specialized officer roles, and racing against sharper fields showed up in denser meet calendars, more teammates racing together, and All-American depth that mirrors the evidence that community tracks improvement better than isolated training.
From grassroots to national presence
So they built the missing infrastructure. Athletes at Notre Dame Running Club turned that culture into shared tools: durable results history, better interclub communication, and a national platform that still races NIRCA nationals while serving 190 colleges nationwide.
How it started
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Aug 2022
Club history sheet and summaries
Jonathan Karr created a Google Sheet for Notre Dame Running Club to track the club’s historical results, and began writing season summaries so marks and stories would not disappear after each meet.
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Fall 2022
Nationals qualification scouting
Jonathan manually tracked which teams looked likely to qualify for nationals and shared those reads inside the club. It was useful, and it made the larger gap obvious: every club was guessing from incomplete data, with no common place to compare.
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Jan 2023
Notre Dame club Substack
The club launched its Substack to publish club stories and race coverage, before the national coaches poll existed.
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Aug 2023
CRC Coaches Poll
Jonathan launched the CRC Coaches Poll so clubs across the country could rank the best NIRCA cross country and track programs and begin talking to each other in one channel.
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Sep 2023
CRC Substack
Ben Darden (Virginia Tech) launched the CRC Coaches Poll Substack so national club racing had a public newsletter, not only private spreadsheets.
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Fall 2023
A shared national Google Sheet
To compile poll inputs, Ben and other poll members helped build the first national results sheet. For the first time, club marks from many colleges lived in one place instead of scattered meet PDFs.
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2023-24
Classroom prototype
In Professor Ramzi Bualuan’s Advanced Database course, Jonathan, with Kayla Ambrose and Evan Hall, turned that sheet into a National Running Club Database prototype.
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Summer 2024
Built in the open
Jonathan kept shipping features through the summer so clubs could use a real product, not a class demo, when the season returned.
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Aug 12, 2024
Public launch
NRCD went live at nationalrunningclubdatabase.com. Clubs began uploading historical and current meets; the corpus has grown into a national research and competition infrastructure.
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Aug 2025
Club Coordination Council Discord
Ninawa Odicho (University of Illinois) launched the Club Coordination Council Discord as a shared communication platform between clubs and NIRCA, closing the interclub gap that started this whole story.
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July 2026
Meet registration and live results
NRCD launched on-platform meet registration and live results so clubs can run race day without a separate ops stack. That goes beyond a D-I-style results archive into tools NCAA Division I public browsers typically do not provide together.
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Today
National presence
190 clubs in 39 states, 141,928 approved marks, open papers and Zenodo releases, and community coverage that treats NRCD as the club sport’s shared results home. Full history also lives on our About page.
What the build unlocked
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Advanced analytics for clubs
Thousands of athletes can track PRs, progression, and meet data that used to live in PDFs and private sheets.
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Standardized performance data
Public algorithms adjust XC times for course grade, weather, wind, and elevation so marks on different courses become comparable.
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Open scientific research
The same corpus powers peer-facing papers on standardization and schedule analytics for non-varsity collegiate athletics.
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National officer community
The CRC Coaches Poll still connects hundreds of schools with shared rankings and friendly rivalry.
Meet the athletes behind the prototype at the Running Club of Notre Dame, follow their Substack, or read the full product history on About.
Visit ND Running ClubThe gap we solve
NRCD looks familiar if you know NCAA Division I results sites: meets, marks, teams, and history in one place. Club running never had that floor. We built the floor, then went beyond what D-I athletes usually get from public tools alone.
Before / elsewhere
- Results trapped in PDFs, private sheets, and closed websites
- No bulk export from Athletic.net, MileSplit, or TFRRS
- Outside research often stuck at about 500 race results, with no public downloadable dataset
- Course weather, distance, and elevation rarely comparable
- NCAA D-I browsing tools still lack open meet registration, live results, and research-grade exports for clubs
With NRCD
- One moderated live platform for NIRCA clubs that matches D-I-style coverage and then exceeds it
- 141,928 approved performances and growing
- Gender-stratified corpus (39.4% women)
- Unified standardization for weather, elevation, course, and venue
- Same formulas on the website, in
nrcd, and in Zenodo
Beyond NCAA Division I tooling
Matching a D-I results archive was the start. Club athletes also needed operations and analytics that public NCAA D-I stacks typically do not put in one open product.
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July 2026 · Meet registration and live results
Clubs can run roster registration and live meet-day results on the platform itself (upcoming meets). That ops layer is not what NCAA Division I programs get from a public results browser alone.
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Advanced analytics NCAA sites do not ship together
Power rankings, predicted matchups, head-to-head comparisons, and weather-aware standardization so marks stay comparable across courses and days.
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Research-scale open data
Without a public downloadable dataset, prior club-running analyses often stopped near about 500 race results. NRCD publishes a moderated corpus and annual Zenodo releases so the next paper can start from tens of thousands of marks, not a private scrape.
How the prototype works
A production system already in use by clubs, with an open scientific layer that updates yearly.
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1
Community submits
Any club can upload meets and results through the live website.
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2
Admins approve
Moderators review submissions before marks become public competition data or research corpus.
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3
Times standardize
Weather, elevation, course length, and venue factors produce comparable marks.
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4
Science opens
Annual PII-safe Zenodo export and
pip install nrcdmatch the site.
Who benefits
- Athletes get a durable history of every mark in one place.
- Coaches get Automark registration, live results, records, and fairer comparisons.
- Researchers get reproducible data and the same formulas used in production.
- The sport gets evidence that includes women and the full club ability band.
National reach
These numbers update from the live NRCD database: teams with at least one approved result.
Club athletes are real athletes
NIRCA club runners compete for their universities without being limited to an exclusive varsity roster. Programs must serve the full band of ability on campus, from first-time collegiate racers to athletes who would place on many NCAA, NAIA, or NJCAA teams.
That breadth is why open data matters. Scheduling, equity, and progression research should reflect the athletes who actually race, not only an elite subset.
Day to day, clubs use Automark registration, live results with national badges, records, and analytics. Once a year, researchers get a PII-safe export of the same community.
Teams by NIRCA region
Live distribution of 190 clubs with approved results.
Corpus dashboard
Same approved-entry rules as the public Database Summary: named athletes with timed results. Unique runners are split by athlete gender.
Unique runners by gender
Named athletes with at least one approved timed result.
Historical vs current
Era uses meet start date: historical before Aug 2023, current from Aug 2023 onward (same cutoff as coverage tools).
Meets and results by state
Venue state on approved meets, ordered by results. Click a bar to search NRCD for that state.
Results across the U.S.
Darker states have more approved results. Click a state to search NRCD.
| Pennsylvania PA | 92 | 22,451 |
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| Virginia VA | 112 | 17,896 |
| Indiana IN | 97 | 16,736 |
| Michigan MI | 96 | 14,842 |
| Illinois IL | 66 | 12,318 |
| North Carolina NC | 180 | 11,788 |
| Massachusetts MA | 59 | 9,177 |
| Ohio OH | 63 | 5,158 |
| Kentucky KY | 23 | 3,402 |
| New Jersey NJ | 23 | 3,139 |
| Wisconsin WI | 79 | 3,132 |
| Maryland MD | 17 | 2,886 |
| California CA | 95 | 2,750 |
| New York NY | 42 | 2,587 |
| Oregon OR | 111 | 1,951 |
| Connecticut CT | 15 | 1,827 |
| District of Columbia DC | 6 | 1,453 |
| Iowa IA | 30 | 1,275 |
| Tennessee TN | 23 | 1,019 |
| Rhode Island RI | 6 | 1,013 |
| Minnesota MN | 15 | 852 |
| South Carolina SC | 14 | 845 |
| Florida FL | 23 | 734 |
| Georgia GA | 19 | 727 |
| Arizona AZ | 8 | 539 |
| West Virginia WV | 11 | 472 |
| Missouri MO | 24 | 313 |
| Delaware DE | 4 | 204 |
| D.C. | 1 | 144 |
| Arkansas AR | 9 | 115 |
| Texas TX | 5 | 60 |
| Nebraska NE | 3 | 51 |
| Alabama AL | 4 | 31 |
| Washington WA | 2 | 19 |
| Colorado CO | 3 | 10 |
| Kansas KS | 3 | 7 |
| Hill | 1 | 3 |
| Nevada NV | 1 | 1 |
| Poland | 1 | 1 |
Findings
Evidence from the methods paper and XC analytics paper. Live charts use the website database; paper charts use published table values. Associations are observational, not causal.
Live corpus
A national, multi-sport archive
The live site now holds 141,928 approved performances across 1,386 meets. Gender-stratified reporting keeps women visible in the evidence base (39.4% of athletes with approved results).
Corpus by sport
Approved performances on the live site, by sport and gender.
Methods paper
Standardization makes meets comparable
Full XC standardization lowers median within-athlete cross-meet variability by 51.0% for women and 34.4% for men versus raw times. Distance-only conversion still overstates mean first-to-last seasonal gains by about 14 s (women) and 20 s (men).
Standardization impact
Percent drop in median within-athlete XC variability vs raw times.
XC analytics paper
An inverted-U, not “more is always better”
Median first-to-last Standardized gains rise into the mid-season race window, then fall at 5+ races. Mixed models confirm that inverted-U shape without a significant sex difference. Separately, race-result features still do not forecast which athlete improves next season (best held-out men’s R² ≈ 0.04; women’s negative).
Inverted-U by race volume
Median first-to-last seasonal gain (sec) by race count, Standardized times.
XC analytics paper
Team race frequency tracks nationals placement
While individuals are hard to forecast, programs whose athletes race more often show higher nationals placement rates (pooled RR = 2.09 at ≥4 races; GEE OR = 2.56 per SD). Treat this as an associational signal for hypothesis generation, not proof that adding meets causes place.
Nationals placement association
Pooled risk ratio for nationals placement by team race-frequency threshold.
Papers & open stack
Methods, schedule analytics, and the artifacts needed to reproduce them.
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Methods · dataset CIKM submission · 2026
NRCD: An Open Database of Collegiate Running with Unified Performance Standardization
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Analytics · XC arXiv · 2026
Faster Results from a Smarter Schedule: Reframing Collegiate Cross Country through Analysis of the National Running Club Database
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Public research dataset
Annual PII-safe export of approved performances. Updated once per year.
Zenodo record -
nrcd Python package
The same distance, elevation, heat, and venue adjustments used on the live site.
pip install nrcd -
Live platform
Teams, meets, Automark, records, and analytics in production for NIRCA clubs.
nationalrunningclubdatabase.com
Team
Researchers and community builders behind NRCD. Interested in joining the effort? Email jkarr@nd.edu.
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Jonathan A. Karr Jr.
Creator · Lead researcher
University of Notre Dame · National Running Club Database
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Ryan M. Fryer
Graduate researcher
University of Notre Dame · University of Virginia
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Ben Darden
Results contributor · Writer
Uploaded over 50,000 results and written club-running articles that grow the national corpus.
Virginia Tech
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Nicholas Pell
NRCD Vice President · Results contributor · Writer
Uploaded over 50,000 results and written articles that help clubs find and trust the data.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Owen Christou
CRC Coaches Poll Vice President
Penn State University
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Kayla Ambrose
Advanced Database project partner
Built the first NRCD prototype with Jonathan and Evan in Professor Bualuan’s Advanced Database course.
University of Notre Dame
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Evan Hall
Advanced Database project partner
Built the first NRCD prototype with Jonathan and Kayla in Professor Bualuan’s Advanced Database course.
University of Notre Dame
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Ramzi K. Bualuan
Faculty collaborator
University of Notre Dame
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Nitesh V. Chawla
Faculty advisor
University of Notre Dame · Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
Want to join the team?
Students, coaches, and researchers who want to help grow the open club-running evidence base are welcome. Tell us briefly about your background and how you’d like to contribute.
Email jkarr@nd.eduUN Sustainable Development Goals
Open gender-stratified performance data and research on training under environmental stress align with these global goals.
- Good Health and Well-Being Running supports student health and academic outcomes. Fairer, standardized performance data helps clubs design healthier, evidence-informed racing seasons.
- Gender Equality Prior collegiate analyses often skewed male. NRCD reports women and men separately (39.4% women among athletes with approved results) so findings generalize across athletes.
Next steps
Finish times tell us who raced and how fast under fair conditions. The next gap is everything that happens before the gun: training load, recovery, and health signals that athletes already capture on devices. We are filling that gap by linking opt-in sync to the race results they claim on NRCD.
NRCD keeps the open meet corpus as the competition backbone while we add how athletes prepared, recovered, and arrived at each mark. Researchers who want to collaborate on Connected Health models or consent UX can join the team.
Empower club leaders and future research
NRCD exists to empower the people who run clubs and the people who study them: officers who need trustworthy tools on Tuesday night, and researchers who need open methods that outlast one season.
Empower club leaders
Officers and coaches with the full picture
Moderated results, meet registration and live results, power rankings, and the CRC Coaches Poll belong in one place so presidents, training chairs, and meet hosts can plan with the clarity Division I staff expect, plus ops tools public D-I browsers still lack.
Empower future research
Open science beyond one campus
The same corpus should empower the next paper and classroom project. Annual
Zenodo
releases, pip install nrcd, and published methods let scholars reproduce
standardization and extend the work without rebuilding the database from scratch.
Force for good in the world
A culture that started in a Notre Dame club room now aims to lift collegiate club running, open science, and athlete health as a force for good in the world.
Research & team inquiries: jkarr@nd.edu · support: nationalrunningclubdatabase@gmail.com