Division 1 Track and Field is considered to be the highest level of competition in the college ranks. By all estimations that statement is true. Right now Ryan Wilson is gearing up for his first collegiate season in D1 running for Duke University. But he is not a freshman, he’s actually far from it. That’s because his first season is guaranteed to be his last one after transferring up from NCAA Division 3. 

Ryan Wilson ran his entire college career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology! He also didn’t need a scholarship to prove his greatness. In fact, he has been so dominant winning championships at the D3 level, that he likely could of won an NCAA championship by now in Division 1. So hopefully all the teams in the ACC and for that matter the NCAA have a plan to beat a man that was supposed to begin his engineering career by now.

How good was Ryan Wilson in high school?

At the high school level Ryan Wilson was actually really good. He was good enough to get recruited D1 if he wanted to. Competing out of California, he would have rated as a 4 star recruit on SCA Recruiting at the end of his junior year of high school. He went 1:52 in the 800 meter as a junior, but honestly wasn’t anywhere near as good in any other track event at the time. He likely could have gotten some interest from UCLA, and Stanford if he really wanted to go there. But Ryan took the road less traveled, and went all the way across the country to a Division 3 school. One that is known as one of the nation’s best engineering schools and clearly expected to win anything in sports.

However, MIT track and field is actually very good. They are talented not just for Division 3 but for the entire nation. The year 2018 was when Ryan was recruited. That season MIT won the New England D3 Outdoor Track championship with twice as many points as any other team in the meet. Keep in mind, there were 30 teams that showed up. They underachieved at the NCAAs that year, but it was clear MIT track and field was no joke before he got there.

Ryan Wilson’s rise to become NCAA champion

Ryan never ran the 800 meter in college after high school officially until the year 2022. He actually never ran a track race, and only competed in cross country races in 2018, 2019, and again in 2021. That’s three seasons of cross country eligibility gone with not one race on a track. This is for a young man who was a 4 star recruit for the D1 level coming out of high school. When he first got to college he was nothing special in cross country either. I was a D2 Head coach in cross country and he wouldn’t even be the fastest runner on the team I was coaching at the time!

While Ryan was running cross country for all those years, he was clearly getting a whole lot better. He dropped his 8K time by nearly 4 full minutes from the beginning of his career to run 24 minutes and 16 seconds at the D3 National Championship meet in 2021. That was good enough to make him a D3 All American, and prove that he was way stronger than he ever was in high school. But it was immediately after that when the legend of Ryan Wilson was born.

Ryan ran his first track season indoors in 2022. A season where Ryan Wilson won the D3 NCAA championship in the 800 meter run and went back to back doing it again outdoors. He was running new PRs and dominating D3, but nobody could have expected what he did during his final season as an Engineer. All this time MIT was building a D3 powerhouse in track and field. But now Ryan Wilson was their leader, and he wasn’t just competing with D3 runners anymore. In his final cross country season, Ryan Wilson finished fifth overall at the NCAA championship meet. That was good enough to help lead the MIT Engineers to a D3 National championship. Indoors the same man who went back to back as the 800 meter champion in 2022 didn’t even run the event a the indoor national championship in 2023. Just a week after setting a new 800 PR beating D1 national qualifiers to do it, he went third in the 3K and won the Mile at the D3 national meet himself. His winning mile time would have been the fastest time at the D1 national meet, either in the prelims or in the finals! THatperformance was good enough to lead MIT to another NCAA championship for indoor track and field, going back to back.

After that during the outdoor season for 2023, Ryan Wilson did what he does. He dominated everyone at the D3 level and won 2 more NCAA championships individually in the 1500, and another one in the 800. But those points were what MIT needed to win the D3 National title outdoors, completing a three peat and sweeping the nation in every NCAA championship for the entire 2022-2023 season.

The Bottom Line

It is unclear what the future of Ryan Wilson’s career will look like. But Ryan Wilson was a 4 star recruit who could have contributed to a major D1 program if he wanted to. He chose to travel all the way across the country and compete at the D3 level, for a school that was never known for anything to do with athletics. He then went three years without even running on the track. Then once he did, he literally never met an NCAA championship meet where he would not travel home as a champion. He then led a team of future Engineers to sweep all of Division 3 as National champions in any meet that they attended for a full calendar year. If all that weren’t enough, he has already proven that he has the potential to run faster than anyone in a D1 uniform. Ryan Wilson has made it clear he is a dangerous man on the track. That man now runs for Duke University in the Division 1’s ACC conference. You can overlook him if you want to, but Ryan Wilson is a threat to win an NCAA championship this season. If he doesn’t it would be the first season he has ever failed to do it on the track in college.

LOOK GOOD, FEEL GOOD, RUN GOOD.

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