2007 was a different time. The Dow Jones began to decline, a terrible Fantastic Four movie was released, and Hillary Clinton was running for president. It also happened to be the last time that the UNM Women’s Cross Country team didn’t win the Mountain West Championship. For seven straight years, the women’s team has taken home the trophy, with the men joining them for the past six years. We’ve been spoiled, to say the least.
Last year was an especially good year for the women. Led by redshirt freshman Alice Wright and senior Charlotte Arter, who finished 20th and 22nd overall respectively, the team took 3rd place at the NCAA D1 Championships. That ended up being their best result in the program’s history and set extremely high expectations for this season. Not only is the team ranked second in the national preseason poll, they received the most first-place votes of any team.
The team should have high expectations, though. Between Wright, Calli Thackery, and Heleene Tambet, they return three top-100 finishers from the NCAA Championships. Add in the continuing influx of talented transfers, and it seems like this team has the potential to have another successful season.
The men’s team also had a great season last year, claiming another Mountain West Championship and finishing 14th at the NCAA Championships. It was a senior-laden team last year, which certainly contributed to that success. However, that means that this year’s team is left with only one runner, Elmar Engholm, who scored points (that is, was one of the team’s top five finishers) for the team in the NCAA Championships. In fact, Engholm, Matthew Bergin, and Graham Thomas are the only returning members who scored points for the team in any of the meets.
With that uncertainty, it speaks volumes of the respect that others have for the program that the men’s team is ranked 21st in the national preseason poll and is again picked to win the conference championship. It will be interesting to see who solidifies themselves as the top runners on the team as the season unfolds.
Looking at the results for last year, it’s interesting to see the depth both teams displayed last season. In the plots below, we can see the points scored by both the women’s and men’s teams in each competition and how each runner contributed to the team scores (remember that in cross country, a lower score is better). As we can see, eight different women scored points in at least one meet while nine different men did the same. This meant that even if a runner was sick, injured, or just having a bad day, there was someone else there to pick up the slack.
Coach Franklin also stressed team running last year, and it certainly showed. In the plots below, the times for each runner who scored points are shown for each competition. The data were so bunched together, that I added some random noise to make the individual results easier to see. The red lines the points are around signify shorter races (5k for the women, 8k for the men) and the black lines signify the longer races (6k for the women, 10k for the men). It’s clear that not much separated the men’s results, particularly at the MW Championship on 10/31, while the women only saw a slightly larger spread. Although some runners set the pace, the others showed to ability to keep up. One thing we’ll be keeping track of this year is seeing if this trend continues.
This weekend marks the first event of the season, when the team takes off to Ruidoso to compete against Texas Tech, UTEP, and NMSU on Friday. Both squads are expected to win (although UTEP’s men’s team is no slouch), but I’m not sure that this event will give us much clarity as to the rest of the season. That will likely come at the bigger events, namely the Notre Dame Invitational and the Wisconsin Invitational, where the larger field will provide an opportunity to see how good the teams are nationally. With any luck though, we’ll be seeing both teams compete in the NCAA Championships once again, hopefully setting new program bests.