Before the cross country season began, I wrote a preview entitled “Cross Country’s High Expectations.” In it, I referenced the women’s cross country team’s third place finish at the NCAA National Championships last year and implied that the team had the potential to be competitive nationally again. Sometime in the past couple of months, those high expectations went from thinking that the team could be in the hunt for the national title to thinking that the team should win the title. On Saturday, the women delivered and did so in spectacular fashion.
The Lobos finished with 49 points, which is the best team score in the National Championships since 1982, when Virginia tallied 48 points. However, in that race, there were only 16 teams competing, as opposed to the 31 teams that raced Saturday. This might not have been the best performance in this race in terms of points, but for my money it’s the best performance in the Women’s National Championship ever. The Lobos did this by assembling an incredibly deep team filled with top-tier runners. Take this, for instance: the top 40 finishers are honored as All-Americans. The Lobos’ top five runners all finished in the top 25. Need another example? By the time the Lobos’ fifth runner finished, no other team had more than two finishers.
In the following plot, we see the results for the top 10 scoring teams, with a breakdown of how they got their score from their top 5 runners. The Lobos, as they’ve been all year, were dominant, beating the second place team by 80 points and third place by 165. What’s even more amazing, to me at least, is that if for some reason the Lobos were forced to score six runners while everyone else had five, they still would have run. If they had to include all seven runners, they would have finished second. Their combination of depth and high-end talent made them practically unbeatable this season and I don’t know if we’ll see something like this again any time soon.
The next plot shows the results for each runner that competed in the event, with the Lobo runners shown in red. As we see, the top five women were all near the front, finishing in the top 25. The first Lobo finisher, as she has been most of the season, was Courtney Frerichs, who finished fourth with a 19:48.0 time. Right behind her in fifth place was Alice Wright (19:53.1), who I think has a chance to win this race in the next couple of years. A little behind those two were Rhona Auckland (20:07.1) and Calli Thackery (20.07.3), who finished 13th and 15th respectively. Rounding out the top five was Molly Renfer (20:17.5), who with her 24th place finish would have been the top runner for quite a few teams. All five of them are All-Americans, which, combined with the team win, is a fantastic way for Courtney, Calli, and Molly to finish their collegiate cross country careers. A little behind them were Heleene Tambet (20:40.4) and Whitney Thornburg (20:55.4), who finished 74th and 109th, respectively. That means that all seven women finished in the top half of this race, which, I might remind you, had the best women cross country runners in all of D-1.
This was an incredible win for the team and for the university as a whole. It’s only the second National Championship won by a UNM team (the other being the Ski Team in 2004) and the first by a women’s team. Coach Franklin has developed this team into one of the premiere programs in the country and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue to be the case, especially given the amount of talent up and down the current roster. It will be fun to see where they go from here.
Congrats to Coach Franklin, congrats to Courtney, Alice, Rhona, Calli, Molley, Heleene, Whitney, and all the other runners on the team! New Mexico Women’s Cross Country: 2015 NCAA National Champions.
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