COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference (RMAC) celebrated its Hall of Fame Class of 2025 on Thursday night, June 10 at the Colorado Springs Marriott, by inducting a class of six individuals and one team, a prestigious group that included Western Colorado's Lorie Moreno Roch.

Morena Roch '88 was the Mountaineers' first women's national champion, earning it at the 1988 NAIA outdoor championship in the 5,000-meter run.

She earned NAIA All-American honors five times in her career at Western: indoor mile (1987, 1988) and as a member of a distance medley relay team (1987); outdoor 5,000 (1988) and 10,000 (1988).

In her induction speech Moreno Roch led the gathered crowd from her time as a talented high school runner into her initial success as a freshman at a different institution. She described how injury, and her own relentless pursuit of excellence that compounded the issue, led to her having to step away from training and competition for more than two years.

Spurred by her mother, who convinced Moreno Roch to still chase after her degree, she found her way to Western, training and competing the furthest thing from her mind.

Working at a popcorn stand in Gunnison, Moreno Roch was approached by then head cross country and track & field coach Duane Vandenbusche. It took some convincing, including simply asking her to just participate in some training runs initially, but Morena Roch finally made the leap, joining Vandenbusche's young women's team, and the rest is history.

She was accompanied by husband Steve, himself an All-American runner at Western, earning his honor in the men's 3-mile run at the 1987 indoor national championship, along with daughter Christian – a 2024 graduate and cross country runner at Whitman (Wash.) College – and multiple tables full of family and supporters from her life.

The evening's ceremony also recognized the RMAC's four major individual awards, including Western Colorado's Dean Noble as the 2024-25 RMAC Man of the Year. The two-time All-American wrestler is Western Colorado's first honoree of one of the RMAC's major awards – Man, Woman of the Year; Male, Female Scholar Athletes of the Year – and is the first wrestler to earn the RMAC Man of the Year honor.

Also honored on stage were the coach of the year recipients from the 2024-25 year, with Western's Jas Bains accepting his award as the 2024 RMAC Football Coach of the Year. It was Bains' second consecutive coach of the year award and third since picking up his first in 2021.

The RMAC's Brechler Awards, presented for the highest cumulative team grade point average in each of the RMAC's sponsored sports, were officially presented on stage as Western Colorado Athletics Director Miles Van Hee accepted the award for the Mountaineer swimming and diving program, which collected its fourth Brechler in a row and fifth in program history.