GRAD TRANSFER: Katie Thronson to Notre Dame

The Stride Report has confirmed that Tennessee's Katie Thronson will be finishing her eligibility as a graduate transfer later this year at Notre Dame. The former SEC distance talent is expected to have one full year of cross country, indoor track and outdoor track eligibility remaining.

Thronson's addition to the Fighting Irish is a massive one. The soon-to-be Fighting Irish runner will likely provide an encouraging scoring spark to a cross country team that significantly outperformed expectations at last year's NCAA XC Championships, placing 5th overall.

On the track, Thronson has run strong marks of 4:39 (mile), 9:09 (3k), 15:54 (5k) and 10:04 (steeplechase). However, all of those personal bests came during a breakout stretch that followed the latest cross country season.

On the grass, Thronson owns solid postseason finishes, placing 19th at the 2021 SEC XC Championships and then 13th place at the 2021 South Regional XC Championships. Those are very respectable performances, but after truly breaking out on the indoor and outdoor ovals, Thronson may be capable of providing even more scoring potency later this fall.

When looking at last year's results, the Notre Dame women are losing a middle-lineup scorer in Lauren Bailey as well as a couple of non-scoring contributors. But the addition of Thronson should not only make up for the loss of Bailey, but it should also bridge the gaps between between the top-two women in Notre Dame's lineup (Denner and Markezich) and the lower-half of their scoring group.

The potential that Thronson has shown on the track makes us believe that she has an outside shot of being an All-American on the grass if she can continue to build upon her current fitness and her upwards trajectory.

With teams like Colorado, BYU, Stanford and Minnesota losing tons of firepower, Notre Dame has a chance to deliver on podium aspirations that they missed out on last year.

And while the Irish women certainly didn't run like a podium team throughout the majority of last fall, their vast number of returners from a 5th place team at the national meet, paired with the introduction of Thronson, makes a top-four team finish fairly realistic for the women of South Bend, Indiana come November.