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Courtesy of CMS Athletics--
David Juiliano, who was a four-year standout on the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men’s track and field team, and also became the program’s standard-bearer in his only season of competition in cross country, will be of 10 former athletes inducted into the CMS Ted Ducey Hall of Fame on Jan. 21.
In track and field, Juiliano captured four straight SCIAC titles in the 800 meters from 1999-2002, and also added three in the 1500 meters and one in the steeplechase. As a senior, he won the 800, 1500 and steeplechase, while adding a second-place finish in the 5000, earning program records and NCAA qualifying times in all four events (as well as in the 4x400 relay), and capturing the SCIAC Athlete of the Year honor for the second. Twice he finished second at nationals in the 800 meters to earn All-America honors.
Juiliano only ran one full season of cross country, but he made that one season count, finishing second at the 2001 NCAA Division III Championships as a senior, which was the highest finish for a CMS men’s cross country runner, and tied the highest finish for any SCIAC cross country (men or women). His time in an 8K race at the national meet (24:18.9) stood as the program record for 20 years, until it was recently broken by Henry Pick. His name has consistently come up as an historical barometer for CMS cross country with the program’s success in recent years, as Bryn McKillop (2017) and Natalie Bitetti (2023) have matched his second-place finish at nationals for the Athenas, while Thomas D’Anieri (2019) and Henry Pick (2021) have finished third.
After graduating from Claremont McKenna in 2002, he went on to earn his master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is currently a high school math teacher, and in 2018, he became the first-ever winner of the Travis Berry Outstanding High Educator Award at Lincoln High School in Nebraska.
Juiliano recently looked back on his cross country race as part of Claremont McKenna’s 75th Anniversary celebration. “The first thing that I remember was that we had an incredible group of guys that year,” he said. We pushed each other incessantly. I didn't run cross as a freshman, I was injured as a sophomore, and traveled abroad as a junior. Despite all of that, I had success on the track before my senior year and Coaches Goldhammer, Beck and Rossi had a ton of confidence in me that I could excel at XC too. It was overwhelming because I ran mostly the 800 up to that point on the track and 8K seemed like an insane distance. But, slowly, I built up my mileage and confidence and bought into the idea that the coaches had been trying to get me to realize...that I could achieve at a high level. Through getting physically stronger with the team and the coaches believing in me, I became addicted to the challenge of being the best I could be.
“Maybe my favorite memory of the race because this had never happened to me before or after in my entire running career, including my post-collegiate PRs, was that my arms started to go numb,” he added. “I can vividly remember not having feelings in both of my arms and hands. It wasn't like they were dead weight, but it was an eerie sensation that I was literally running for as hard as I could for as long as I could. It was almost as if my body didn't have the resources to provide oxygen or blood to the parts of my body that weren't necessary to keep me moving forward. I had run hard countless times up to that point and ran hard countless times after that race, but this was an incredible feeling that I only experienced that one time. Something about that sensation gave me an extra sense of confidence that it wasn't naive to think that I could win.”
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