I'm an assistant coach at a pretty strong high school team and we have a pretty strong Junior guy (mid 15s in XC 5k this year, low 9:10s and mid 4:20s in the 3200/1600 last year) whose starting to think about college. He's a very smart kid, great grades, internships, etc., but running is also really important to him. I was a pretty good D3 runner, graduated in 2018, and I still follow D3 running a bit, so we talked some about D3 schools that could be a good fit. I'd expect he could get to be a low 14, mid 29 kind of runner at least, so we were looking for programs that had have developed athletes of that caliber, which I know are rare but not unheard of in D3.
Obviously, MIT came up - I assumed they are a great distance program, given their team title in XC this year and second last year, but I was looking at their TFRRS and I didn't see any particularly impressive times on the track. I looked back to like 2015, but I didn't see anyone under 30 in the 10k or 14:20 in the 5k, and honestly not many runners even close to that level. It seems like MIT recruits very well for a D3 school and obviously has found success in XC and the mid-distance races, so this was pretty surprising for me.
Does anyone know why they haven't been very successful over long distance? I don't want the athlete to go there and realize their training isn't helping or find himself working out alone all the time. I don't expect to get an honest answer from their coaches, so I was hoping there might be some people here with knowledge of the program.