The 2024 NCAA DIII Women’s Cross Country and 2022 NCAA DIII Men's Cross Country National Coach of the Year, Riley Macon enters his sixth year at MIT and his fifth year as the men's and women's cross country head coach and assistant track and field coach in 2025-26. In addition, Macon is an instructor within the MIT physical education and wellness program. He was named to the position on July 1, 2022.
Macon previously served as the program's interim head coach during the 2020-21 academic year, while also working as an assistant coach for cross country and coached the distance runners on the track and field teams in 2021-22.
Nationally and regionally recognized as one of the top coaches in the nation, Macon has been named the East Regional Men's and Women's Coach of the Year in 2022, 2023 and 2024, gaining national accolades in the same years that he helped lead the MIT men's cross country team to its first national title in 2022 and the women's team to its first national crown in 2024. In 2023, he was named the NCAA DIII Indoor Track and Field National Assistant Coach of the Year.
In 2024-25, the women’s cross country program earned its first national title with a ten-point win over UChicago, 128-138, as Kate Sanderson, Rujuta Sane and Christina Crow all earned All-America honors for the Engineers. The MIT men finished 13th national while MIT’s men’s and women’s squads won team titles at the East Region Championships, NEWMAC Championships during the season, with the women adding victories at the Connecticut College Invitational, as well as the D3 Pre-Nationals.
The victory at nationals for the women’s cross country program set off a historic string of first, as the Engineers would go on to win both the indoor and outdoor NCAA titles and become the first DIII women’s program to complete the triple crown sweep of all three titles in the same season. Macon played a key role as an assistant throughout track and field season, with MIT winning numerous All-America honors on both the men’s and women’s side. In addition to the women’s team titles, the men’s program finished seventh at indoor nationals and 17th at the NCAA DIII Outdoor Championships.
In 2023-24, Macon swept the East Region Men's and Women's Coach of the Year awards for the second straight season as led the Engineers to an eighth-place finish on the men's side at Nationals with Sam Acquaviva and Lowell Hensgen earning All-America honors while the women's team took 11th at Nationals with Katherine Sanderson earning All-America laurels.
During the 2022-23 season, Macon guided the men's cross country program for the first NCAA team national championship in any sport as his Engineers won the NCAA title with a convincing performance in Lansing, Mich. Five of his men's student-athletes earned USTFCCCA All-America honors, while Macon was named as the men's cross country National Coach of the Year. He also helped lead the women's cross country team to a seventh-place finish at the NCAA National Championship, with two student-athletes picking up All-America accolades.
As an assistant coach with the track and field program, Macon earned USTFCCCA Indoor Men's National Assistant Coach of the Year as the men's team finished as the NCAA National Runner-Up. The women's indoor track and field team finished 16th at the national championship in Birmingham as the Engineers finished the two-day meet with eight All-America performers. At the outdoor NCAA Championship, the men's track and field team earned the NCAA title as they were led by a pair of NCAA individual crowns from Ryan Wilson in the 800 meters and 1,500 meters. They were joined on the podium by the women's track and field team, which powered to a fourth-place finish.
Macon previously served as a volunteer assistant at MIT for the 2018 cross country season and worked as an adjunct professor in the Department of Exercise Science at Middle Tennessee State University. In addition, Macon has served as the deputy director of the Boulder Running Camps, where he planned and executed three camp sessions totaling approximately 350 campers each summer.
He is a 2016 graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in kinesiology. As a student-athlete at Minnesota, Macon was a two-time Academic All-Big Ten Cross Country Scholar-Athlete, a two-year varsity letter winner and earned his Master of Science degree in exercise science from Middle Tennessee State University in 2020.
