Yesterday, the Lobo cross country teams went down to Ruidoso to participate in the Texas Tech Double Duals, and participate they did. If we simply look at the results, they would be less than encouraging. The men’s and women’s teams had identical results, finishing below Texas Tech, NMSU, and UTEP, while only doing better than Wayland Baptist (the men’s results can be found here and the women’s results can be found here). This would be a really disappointing result for the 21st ranked nationally men’s team and the 2nd ranked nationally women’s team, if the goal had been anything but simply to participate.
For this event, the team’s two goals seemed to be to allow some of the less-experienced runners to get a chance to run in a meet and to have an event on the schedule to replace the Lobo Invitational so they still have enough events that count towards the season. So, in that sense, this seems to have been a successful day in Sierra Blanca. Neither the men nor the women fielded a full team of runners, opting to go with five runners for the men and six for the women. Only a handful of these runners competed for the team last year in the main events, and it remains to be seen how many of them will compete for the team this year. This approach to the event was noticeably different than the approach taken by the other teams. For example, Texas Tech basically had their top runners participating for both the men and women.
From all that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that UNM didn’t win this event. Realistically, though, that doesn’t matter. I hope that Coach Franklin was able to see what he wanted to out of those who did run, that they were able to get some good experience from the race, and that no one got hurt. The next event, the Notre Dame Invitational on Oct. 3rd, will be our first chance to see UNM’s top runners compete and will give us a much better idea of how competitive the teams will be this season.