It is a heck of a team for sure, but lets officially stop the All-American 10 minute 2 miler to All-American hyperbole.
Colorado gets studs and a lot of them. Wetmore does as good a job as anyone with developing them (cross country way more than track), but the vast majority of scorers are studs to start too!
A lot of people are also forgetting about Hugh Dowdy too.
He was injured in 2013, but in 2012 he was a top 5 guy and finished 9th at Pac-12s.
again, I'm really impressed by this team's depth. Making top 7 alone will be a fight
Hugh Dowdy was rapidly improving and beat Blake Theroux in his sophmore year. Then had a bad race at regionals and has never been the same since .....I really wonder what happened to him?
I wasn't necessarily suggesting that Wetmore can take anyone (10 minute high school 2-miler) and turn them into an All-American. I think what Wetmore does better than most top notch programs/coaches is identify undervalued talent and then develops it.
For example Gonzales had solid times for a Colorado altitude kid. (like 4:18/9:23) What's interesting is he went down to sea level in only one race and ran 9:00 flat while beating a couple "superstar" Washington State runners. Clearly Wetmore had the advantage of having Gonzales in his "back yard", but he was able to get him to commit to CU with no athletic money, where as a lot of other D1 coaches clearly missed out.
Same goes for Forsyth. While Forsyth had respectable PR's of 4:18/9:09 those performances placed him around 200th or so in the national rankings. Wetmore has been quoted as saying (paraphrasing) "Kids that run 9:15 in southern California aren't the same as kids that run 9:15 in Maine." The same could be said of Maryland where Forsyth is from. Again he had a few full scholarship offers but not many and ultimately choose CU for no athletic money.
I believe both these kids will have very successful college careers.
Mixing in these kind of athletes (See also Blake Theroux, Morgan Pearson, Pierce Murphy) with the occasional Ben Saarel or even Ammar Moussa (highschool version) is what makes Colorado successful. Also let's see what kind of production Wisconsin gets out of the 9 or 10 studs they brought in this year and how many scholarships they have next year.
It's the University of Colorado by the way.
The hype on the boards now sounds very similar to the hype surrounding OSU last year. You folks seem to forget the highly unpredictable nature of college cross country.
I would happily bet money on the field rather than CU. Their win last year was a fluke. They won by being mentally tough in terrible race conditions. That mental fortitude is very hard to predict, and it won't necessarily resurface to differentiate them again this year even if the conditions are bad.
Who thought OSU would win last year?
more wetmore wrote:
I wasn't necessarily suggesting that Wetmore can take anyone (10 minute high school 2-miler) and turn them into an All-American. I think what Wetmore does better than most top notch programs/coaches is identify undervalued talent and then develops it.
For example Gonzales had solid times for a Colorado altitude kid. (like 4:18/9:23) What's interesting is he went down to sea level in only one race and ran 9:00 flat while beating a couple "superstar" Washington State runners. Clearly Wetmore had the advantage of having Gonzales in his "back yard", but he was able to get him to commit to CU with no athletic money, where as a lot of other D1 coaches clearly missed out.
Same goes for Forsyth. While Forsyth had respectable PR's of 4:18/9:09 those performances placed him around 200th or so in the national rankings. Wetmore has been quoted as saying (paraphrasing) "Kids that run 9:15 in southern California aren't the same as kids that run 9:15 in Maine." The same could be said of Maryland where Forsyth is from. Again he had a few full scholarship offers but not many and ultimately choose CU for no athletic money.
I believe both these kids will have very successful college careers.
Mixing in these kind of athletes (See also Blake Theroux, Morgan Pearson, Pierce Murphy) with the occasional Ben Saarel or even Ammar Moussa (highschool version) is what makes Colorado successful. Also let's see what kind of production Wisconsin gets out of the 9 or 10 studs they brought in this year and how many scholarships they have next year.
Ethan Gonzales got athletic money, just not much of it. An athlete quit the team and the money was awarded to Ethan.
[quote]just give me some truth wrote:
Yawn, in the early '80s, UTEP had five sub 28 minute 10,000 meter runners on their team, at the same time.
10,000-METER RUN
27:36.2 Gabriel Kamau 1982
27:38.1 Gidamis Shahanga 1982
27:38.6 Zak Barie 1982
27:51.7 Suleiman Nyambui [quote]rojo wrote:
Yawn, you can't count. That's only 4.