With 3 championships in 3 weeks, College of DuPage cements its winning legacy

"Winning a national championship," said Chloey Myers, a sophomore volleyball player at College of DuPage, "not many people can say that in their lifetime."

While that may be true for the rest of the world, it certainly isn't for College of DuPage, seeing as the school won three national championships in a matter of weeks.

Women's Volleyball: National Champions.

Men's Cross Country: National Champions.

Football: National Champions.

It's not something many people can say in their lifetime, but it's something College of DuPage has worked up to and expected.

Football

Each victorious team came into their season with the assumption that they would win. It was almost a Denzel-Washington-in-"Remember-the-Titans" sort of mindset: "I'm a winner. I am going to win."

"I think from the first day I walked in," said sophomore football player Michael Simon, "the facilities are really nice, the expectations are high, you're expected to win, expected to work hard, and there's just a culture about the building."

The Chaparral football team went 9-2 and, on Dec. 3, beat North Dakota State College of Science 14-12 in the NJCAA Division III Football Championship for the school's second consecutive national championship victory.

"As a defensive player, you really couldn't ask for any other type of game," Simon said of the championship game at Bjarne Ullsvik Stadium in Glen Ellyn. "Spotlight's on us a little bit, game's on our shoulders. We gotta hold down the fort, so we embraced that, and I think that's a big part of why we were able to hold North Dakota College of Science only to 12 points."

Simon, who finished the season with 38 tackles and 3 sacks, was named an All-American defensive end.

Cross country

In that same stadium resides the men's cross country team who, just three weeks prior, had completed the same feat with the same winning mentality as Denzel Washington's Herman Boone - and Simon.

"At the beginning of the year, we kind of set it as a goal of ours," freshman runner Nicholas Keeling said. "We knew that it was something we could do, and then we kind of just got to work and then ended up getting it, so it's a good feeling."

College of DuPage outscored the runners-up (literally), Mineral Area (Mo.), 42-83. Keeling paced his team as the national individual champion, winning his 8,000-meter race by a minute and 16 seconds, with a time of 25:36.16.

Keeling will have another year with the Chaparrals and plans to keep competing after he graduates from COD.

And although it wasn't much of a contest for him in the championship race, he still felt like his team had some rivals within his own school.

"I felt like there was a little friendly competition," Keeling said. "We go out and try and win it, and we were able to get it, and then the volleyball team did it, and then the football team did, so it was kind of cool to see that each team was trying to go out there and show what they can do."

Volleyball

Volleyball was the second team to reel in some hardware, a week after the men's cross country team.

The Chaparrals (32-3) beat Owens Community College 25-21, 22-25, 25-18, 25-18 in the NJCAA National Championship.

Once again, it was presumed that this team was going deep.

"I knew we were going to Nationals, and I knew we'd make it pretty far," Myers said.

Myers was named NJCAA's Player of the Year for Division III volleyball, as she sat on a throne of impressive statistics throughout the entire season. She finished third in the country in kills (461), averaging 3.66 kills per set, finished third in the country with 566.5 points, and a .253 hitting percentage.

"It's honestly unreal," Myers said of her award. "I still haven't fully accepted it yet. It's kind of crazy to get my head around, but I'm very happy, my family's very happy. It feels good to be recognized."

What's next

For Myers, Simon, Keeling, and a lot of the other athletes too, whether they won nationally recognized awards or not, these championships are huge for them.

Each athlete said that this is just one step toward moving on to some place where they might play their respective sport at a higher level, and possibly on scholarship.

"Honestly, I feel like a lot of us do push really hard in our sports," Myers said, "especially being in a JUCO. A lot of us want to get out of here and go somewhere better, especially if you're playing sports."

"Better" isn't a knock on College of DuPage, as it's pretty difficult to find "better" than three national championships within the span of three weeks. "Better" just means a high level of competition, be that Division II or I athletics.

And on the way to get to wherever that "better" might be, College of DuPage seems like the right place to go to help you get there.

"I think it's kind of a self-serving cycle," Keeling said. "When you do well you know that you can do well, and then when you know you can do well, you continue to do well, so I think it really plays into itself.

"And I wouldn't be surprised if there's continued success."