The UNM Cross Country teams went up to Indiana this past Friday to compete in the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invitational, coming away with a win for the women and a 9th place finish for the men. This being their first real event of the season, the teams have to be encouraged by their performances.
The women were dominant, showing that their top national ranking is well-deserved, as they not only showed that they have some top individual runners, they showed a tremendous amount of depth. Not only did their top five finishers all end up in the top 12, their sixth and seventh finishers were top 33 and their eighth finisher was 61st. The team was led by newcomers Courtney Frerichs, a senior transfer from UMKC, and Rhonda Auckland, a junior from Scotland, who finished 2nd (16:27.0) and 4th (16:28.9) respectively. Close behind them were returning runners Alice Wright and Calli Thackery, who finished 5th (16:29.5) and 6th (16:40.6). Another newcomer, Molly Renfer, a senior transfer from Harvard, rounded out the scoring by finishing 12th (16:52.7).
The plot below shows the results of the Women’s 5K race for the individual runners. Each bar represents the time of each runner and the x-axis shows what place the runner came in. The red bars are the Lobos. As we can see, there is a cluster of red on the left side, where all of the top finishers are. As mentioned in our season preview, this is a great example of the team running as a pack. With the talent that they have, if they continue to do that, they will have a very special season.
This next plot shows the point totals for the top 10 teams, including a breakdown of each of the five runners who scored for the team (remember: in cross country, a lower score is better). Each color represents the place the runner finished in for their team. First off, we notice how much the Lobos won this meet by. The total team score was better than the point totals of the top three runners for every team except for NC State, which is kind of crazy to think about. We also see that the Lobos’ point totals are all fairly similar, unlike some teams who maybe had one or two really good runners and then several that finished much further down. All in all, this was an impressive performance by the Lobo women.
The men had a pretty good showing as well, finishing in 9th place overall, behind several teams that are either currently ranked or will likely be ranked soon. The Lobos were led by a couple of returning runners, senior Elmar Engholm and junior Graham Thomas, who finished 18th (24:09.1) and 22nd (24:14.3) respectively. Senior transfer Dan Milechman had a good debut as a Lobo, finishing 28th (24:20.5). Those three represent a nice core for the team, as the team lost a lot of talent from last season, but they’ll need some of the other new runners to keep pace with them if the team is going to reach a higher level. Freshman Josh Kerr could be one of those who could play a key part for the team this year, as he made his debut with a 71st place finish. Hopefully he and other runner or two will be able to keep pace with the team’s top runners in the subsequent events.
The following plot shows the results of the Men’s 5 mile race for the individual runners. As before, each bar represents a runner, their time is the height of the bar and the x-axis is their finishing position. The red bars are again the UNM runners. We see that the top three runners for the Lobos all ran fairly close to one another, but there was a pretty large gap between them and the fourth and fifth team finishers. There was another large gap after the point scorers to the other UNM finishers. To me, this shows that the men’s team doesn’t have nearly the same level of depth that the women’s team does, which, again, is partially due to the runners who graduated after last season.
As before, this next plot shows the top 10 teams, with a breakdown of each of the five runners who scored for the teams. One thing that sticks out to me about the UNM performance is that the top three runners were on par with most of the teams ahead of them, so the difference between them and those other teams came in the fourth and fifth runners. Again, the team needs more production from some of their runners who are currently outside of their top three. Because this was the team’s first meet, and the first race for the team for several of the runners, there is certainly hope that production could appear in the future.
I think in general, the teams should both feel good about their performances at South Bend, IN. Clearly, the women were great and they proved to everyone that they are serious contenders for a national championship this season. The men got some good performances from their returning runners and got some experience for some of their newcomers. The next test for the two teams will come on October 16th, when they travel up to Madison, WI for the Wisconsin Invitational. Hopefully they can build on these performances and have another strong showing.