Madeline Fletcher finished up her 2024 cross-country campaign with a 13th-place finish at the CCCAA State Championship on Nov. 23, helping propel Cuesta College’s women’s cross-country team to 17th place overall.
Fletcher’s top-15 finish marked the end of an impressive season despite having minimal cross-country experience. She added All-State First Team and All-Region First Team accolades as well as placing first at the Western State Conference Finals.
Unlike most community college athletes who compete at this level in their freshman and sophomore years, Fletcher’s path to this point has been quite unorthodox.
Fletcher began her collegiate career in 2019 as a track and field athlete for Oregon State. Due to injuries and the pandemic that sent everyone online, her stint there was brief, never getting a chance to compete.
“It was preseason so we were just training a lot, and I very quickly got injured,” Fletcher said. “I had stress fractures in both tibias so double boots. It was a look.”
After finishing her freshman year online, Fletcher understood things wouldn’t change the next year so she transferred to Cuesta and went on to dominate the track and field competition as she completed her second year of college. Fletcher ended the year owning top-10 marks in three different events for Cuesta as well as claiming the 2021 Cuesta Female Athlete of the Year.
Fletcher then went on to finish her kinesiology degree at Saint Mary’s College of California where injuries again got in the way of competing throughout an entire season.
“So my first season there ended abruptly,” Fletcher said. “I had a grade two sprain and bone bruising on my ankle, but I was a kinesiology student so that was actually kind of fun because I knew exactly what was going on. And then senior year, I competed a little bit more, had a few more ankle sprains and graduated May 2023.”
Fletcher came back to her hometown to coach for Cuesta’s track and field team the next spring. During this time, track and field and cross country head coach, Robert Kneely, knew they needed one more runner for the women’s cross country team to be able to score points in the fall officially.
“So I’d done a 4-2-4 as a track athlete, but I’d only run like one cross country race in my last year at Saint Mary’s,” Fletcher said. “So in a cross-country sense, I was going from a 4-year to a 2-year, and that was allowed.”
While her addition to the cross-country team was a great benefit to Cuesta performance-wise, Kneely credited her intangibles as a major impact by having her there both as a coach and athlete.
“By her athletic ability and top finishes, she’s helped our team score points to finish well enough to qualify for the state meet,” Kneely said. “From a different perspective, she’s impacted the team with her maturity and her commitment and her coachability. She really sets a great example of how a cross-country athlete, or just a person in general, should act and behave.”
Fletcher’s willingness to step up for Cuesta came at the perfect moment, helping the team qualify for state for the first time since 2021. Luckily, Kneely expects numbers to rise as he continues to rebuild the program.
“We had two women on the team my first year as a cross country coach last year,” Kneely said. “We had six on the team this year. I’m hoping to have closer to 10 next year for those reasons of depth and better training partners.”
While the book appears to be finally closed for Fletcher as a college athlete, her impact on Cuesta will continue when she returns this spring to coach the women’s track and field team. Fletcher also plans to compete in triathlons next year while she continues to apply to athletic training schools for her future career.
