She had a long xc season with USA XC team, and was constantly fighting some plantar stuff. The track red shirt was most likely to get her recovered and healthy. It's been pretty normal for red shirting at NC State leaving 5th and even 6th years of leftover indoor and outdoor eligibility.
Will be interesting to see impact of new '5 yrs of eligibility' plan, if adopted.
NC St for sure a contender next yr, but I think BYU will emerge as the favorite and have more depth.
“Doritos taco” 🤭
Yeah, I though double threshold after I posted.
IIRC, she was on the younger side when she started at NC State not tuning 18 until the winter or just before spring. I believe she’s still 22 and will be 22 during cross season so really not older than others in her class.
It seem like Henes sometimes needs to restrain her because she wants to do more. That’s a good thing.
Let me guess, those top teams have several Kenyan-Americans
Most of those teams have Kenyans and a few Americans. BYU will be pretty much all US citizens competing and many of them from the state of Utah.
We go thru this every year. It's not like BYU has some special program to recruit in state Utah kids for xc&track. About 27/30 runners in program are LDS, who would most likely attend BYU, even if they were not athletes; many from Utah. These LDS kids just happen to be very fast, in both high school and college.
Not same as for example Iowa State declaring that from now on they will focus on mainly Iowa kids, and then coach them up. Even if they got all of the best 3-5 Iowa kids each year, they would still not be able to get enough talent to be a top 5 ncaa team.
With a big NIL, it's not even a sure thing that they could lure the Iowa kids to stay. The bond between an Iowan and Iowa St is just not the same as the bond between LDS families and BYU.