This story was updated on August 26 and December 31, 2024.
Mike Smith, who has led the Northern Arizona University men’s cross-country team to five national titles and coaches four 2024 American Olympians, as well as other pro athletes, will become a Nike coach at the end of the 2025 academic year, sources tell Runner’s World.
The deal will have Smith coaching NAU, in Flagstaff, Arizona, for the 2024–25 cross-country and track seasons. Smith, 44, will remain in Flagstaff and coach Nike professional runners after that.
His current elite roster has several athletes who represent other brands, including Olympians Nico Young (who signed with Adidas for a multiyear deal in June 2024), Nikki Hiltz (Lululemon), Luis Grijalva (Hoka), and Smith’s wife, Rachel Smith, who ran for Hoka through 2024 before announcing her time with the company was ending. Those athletes will be “grandfathered” in with Smith through the life of their current deals with those brands and have the option to continue with him as their coach during that time. Once their deals expire, however, they must be Nike athletes to continue training with Smith.
In a brief phone call with Runner’s World in July, Smith acknowledged that Nike had made him an offer, but said he was not making any decision until after the Olympics. A Nike spokeswoman, contacted on July 19 about potential coaching changes, took questions from Runner’s World but did not follow up with answers.
Smith already coaches several Nike pros, including 2024 Olympians Abdihamid Nur (who required surgery to repair his post tibial tendon after he got tangled up during the first round of the Olympic 5,000 meters) and Woody Kincaid, as well as two-time Olympic medalist Galen Rupp.
Smith joined NAU, which has a branding deal with Adidas for its sports teams, in 2016. In addition to the five cross-country titles, Smith has led the Lumberjacks to two runner-up finishes. In 2023, the women’s team was the national runner-up by one point.
Among top-level coaches, Smith appeared to have more than a full load, between the college program he headed and the pros. He and his wife also have a 16-month-old daughter.
Nike has tried in the past to hire Smith. He was thought to have turned down an offer to be the head coach at the University of Oregon, which has close ties to Nike, in 2022.
That job went to Jerry Schumacher, who kept his duties as the head coach of the Bowerman Track Club and moved the athletes of Bowerman from Portland to Eugene so Schumacher could do both jobs. Many pros, dissatisfied with the move and their coach’s divided attention, left the group. The Bowerman roster is significantly smaller than it was in 2016, when seven women made the Olympic team. At the time, Bowerman was seen as the premier distance training group in the country.
Now, Nike athletes train on their own or in disparate groups. Three former Bowerman runners have established their own training situations: Grant Fisher went back to his high school coach, Mike Scannell, at the end of the 2023 season, and he trains in Park City, Utah. The move paid off for Fisher with two bronze medals at the Olympics in Paris.
Elise Cranny largely trains on her own in Colorado. Courtney Frerichs, a silver medalist in the steeplechase, is being coached by two Puma coaches currently, even though she is a Nike athlete.
Other Nike pros have been rethinking their training situations this year. Marathoner and former U.S. record holder Keira D’Amato recently joined Ed Eyestone in Provo, Utah; Eyestone trains marathoner Conner Mantz, a Nike athlete, as well as Kenneth Rooks, a Nike-sponsored steeplechaser who won silver in Paris. Eyestone also has athletes representing different shoe brands, including Asics-sponsored Olympic marathoner Clayton Young.
A Smith-led pro group could help fill a void in Nike’s training offerings that would appeal to runners coming out of college and looking for a group dynamic.
Current NAU assistant coach Jarred Cornfield will take over the head coaching role in the spring of 2025, according to a press release issued by NAU’s athletic department.
“For the past eight years I have lived out a professional dream coaching at Northern Arizona University,” Smith said in the release. “It has been my greatest privilege to work with the most loyal and brave student athletes a coach could ask for ... It’s been an honor of a lifetime to coach at NAU.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
