College cross country

What are your track pr's

It depends.

Not looking at their rosters and researching their backgrounds, my guess is D1 school like those are going to want to see decent track PRs. 4:15-20/9:20ish. Wisconsin and Michigan will probably require something faster. Ohio State and Michigan State don't typically have the same distance reputations. You should check their rosters and see their HS PRs and see how you compare.

But here's a question, why do you want to run at those schools?

Don't chase D1 for the sake of it. Be clear of the program's goals and how they will train you. Some programs emphasize sprints and jumps and emphasize indoors AND outdoors and Conference meets. So you could be run and raced into the ground.

Plus, if you are in the low end of what their recruits ran in HS, you really have to be willing to be training hard and wait for a while for results to show. College running is hard and it takes time to adapt to the stress. Plus the added life stress of academics and a social life can wear on you.

Don't be afraid to look at other schools. Smaller D1 or D2 can offer scholarships. If there is a state school that is D3, you won't get a scholarship, but will still save on tuition. And there are many good D3 programs that produce teams as fast as D1 schools.

Lastly, pick a school you will enjoy attending even if you don't run. After all, the end of the day, you go to school to get an education. If you don't like the place, it will affect your studies.

Back in my day, there were a couple of kids who walked on to Michigan with a similar 5K time, but that was right after Willis/Brannen had graduated and so Michigan's XC team was really crap with zero All-Americans and most of them placing in the 100s at Nationals.

It was shocking really. Kids who couldn't even get a sniff on the traveling squad and were running mostly local races and occasional regional meets unattached a year or two before suddenly becoming Michigan's #3 runner.

Not sure about the situation now though.

But keep in mind if 15:40 is all you got, and your track times are comparable (by that I mean crap), then the coach is likely not going to give you any attention at all, and you will basically be just a passenger on the bus.

Hey man, I back up what one of the previous posters said about fully evaluating your options and not focusing too much on just running in a certain conference. Also, times in cross country are irrelevant unless run on a well recognized course. I won my FL region, but all the courses I ran during the regular season were very difficult and my times were much slower than my FL time. Was that a way better performance? No. It was just a different course with much better depth in competition. I was initially recruited based off my junior year track times, having a nice xc season was just icing on the cake. You need to drop some strong times this spring if you want to have your pick of power 5 conference D1 teams to compete for. If you ran 15:40 on a legitimate, respectable course then you should be capable of sub 9:20.