ISU once dominated women’s cross country

Title IX sequence: Led by Peg Neppel-Darrah, Cyclones received 4 AIAW titles from 1975 to ’78

Peg Neppel-Darrah was Iowa State’s first girls’s nationwide champion. (Iowa State)

Editor’s notice: That is second in a sequence counting down the Prime 10 moments in Iowa State Cyclones girls’s athletics historical past within the days main as much as the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX on Thursday.

AMES — They went 4 for 4.

That’s how profitable Iowa State’s girls’s cross nation groups had been by way of nationwide championships within the first 4 years of this system’s existence.

The Cyclones swept 4 Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Ladies (AIAW) crowns from 1975-78 — and Peg Neppel-Darrah grew to become the primary ISU girls in any sport to assert a nationwide title in 1975.

A dynasty had begun, which is why the workforce’s towering early achievements examine in at No. 4 on our Prime 10 countdown (in no specific order) chronicling noteworthy figures and moments in ISU girls’s sports activities.

Six years after the workforce’s preliminary success on the nationwide stage, Dorthe Rasmussen joined Neppel-Darah as an AIAW champion. However occasions had been altering throughout girls’s sports activities. The NCAA held its first girls’s championships within the fall of 1981. ISU selected to stay underneath the AIAW umbrella and added one other workforce title the identical 12 months. The Cyclones have completed among the many high 10 in cross nation nationwide meets 13 occasions, most just lately in 2021 when Cailie Logue and firm helped them place ninth.

Neppel-Darrah set quite a few world information all through her illustrious, however tragically brief profession. The Dolliver native died of most cancers on the age of 28, however her legacy lives on at ISU and throughout girls’s sports activities. She was, briefly, a trailblazer.

“Peg was an excellent athlete whose accomplishments not solely positioned Iowa State College’s girls’s cross nation and observe within the nationwide highlight however by way of her athletic achievements, she helped to deliver recognition and respect to girls’s intercollegiate athletics in its adolescence,” then-ISU athletics director Lou McCullough mentioned after Neppel-Darrah’s demise.

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