Minnesota Men's Cross Country 6th at Big Tens

Sarah, stop coming on here. Nobody wants to hear from you!

Goph wrote:

Sarah, stop coming on here. Nobody wants to hear from you!

Trust me dude she has better things to do than comment on a message board. I'm a gopher parent with enough info on both programs to have a reasonably well informed opinion. I frankly don't care about the men's team except UMN is a great school that I wish was a better running option for my son.

How many goddamn oles are going to shitpost about the dark moose

Wonder if they'd give any thought to hiring Andrew Carlson. His teams at North Dakota State have been really good and he's developed some great athletes there. Clearly knows what he's doing, and if he can recruit people to Fargo, imagine what he could do with the Twin Cities to sell instead.

That's the gopher pitch- brainwash everyone how they develop walk-ons into big ten scorers. Forget the fact their scholarship athletes tend to flounder in college. When you have 20 walk-ons each year and run the crap out of them, every so often someone will break through. It does seem that these last couple years their top group hasn't got injured or burnt out (so far), so maybe they're turning the corner in that area .

It's just too bad that with all the talent in the midwest, the big ten schools in the area - Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, for one reason of another have greatly underachieved. Wisco men have been documented a lot on these boards and while they've thrown away talent like the MN men, nobody's really taken advantage of their drop.

There has been some pretty good success in MN mid D and distance men. Mitch Henschel, Ruess (?) both made it to NCAA championship in Eugene along with Obsa last spring. On top of that Evan Ferlic has come from basically nowhere to run 14:12ish for 5k. Plus I believe one of their guys won the indoor mile last year or at least was right up there. Shane Streich ran close to 4:00 in the mile.

Those things are well above average success for a school that is very mediocre in a cold winter climate. the U of MN doesn't benefit from being a great academic institution like Michigan, Notre Dame, Stanford, etc. Plus it is hard to get kids to come to the frozen tundra from anywhere outside the upper Midwest.

As said earlier, the women have a larger roster and this is likely by university design (title IV). Nothing wrong with this but when you have a large roster there are more chances that someone will emerge.

The men have advance more than not to the NCAA XC Championships over the past 20 years. I am not saying the program is perfect but it is solid at the national level.

Goldy Goph wrote:

Wonder if they'd give any thought to hiring Andrew Carlson. His teams at North Dakota State have been really good and he's developed some great athletes there. Clearly knows what he's doing, and if he can recruit people to Fargo, imagine what he could do with the Twin Cities to sell instead.

Thanks Andrew.

safety in numbers wrote:

That's the gopher pitch- brainwash everyone how they develop walk-ons into big ten scorers. Forget the fact their scholarship athletes tend to flounder in college. When you have 20 walk-ons each year and run the crap out of them, every so often someone will break through. It does seem that these last couple years their top group hasn't got injured or burnt out (so far), so maybe they're turning the corner in that area .

Examples please. You have no idea what you are talking about when you say run the crap out of them. You could not be more off base. Look into the training they are actually doing and then look up the performances and progression.

Hechsel and Roese (and maybe Streich?) have a different coach than the cross coach, so judge that how you will.

Minnesota is not a great academic institution? Uh huh. It might not be Stanford, but MN is a massive research institution with a relatively affordable tuition. Poor academics isn't their problem. Also if you think MN is the only school with cold winters, come on. And tbh MN is one of the best schools to support winter running as the city plows most of the myriad of trails that crisscross the area.

Yes the men have advanced to NCAA's relatively often (less so recently), but being in the top 20 is another matter. They've done it, but not often, and when they did they usually had front runners that could have been coached by a plank of wood and still had success (Mead, Rombough, Blankenship).

The fact of the matter is that Minnesota is where midwest athletes go to die. I judge teams on their athletes progressing consistently, running best their junior/senior year, and running best at the end of each season. MN fails those tests.

I've watched too much local talent go there and get crushed to not speak up, but luckily I'm not the only one and the local high school coaches are starting to catch on.

Sorry for the rant, but seriously, this is not a program (really a coach) you want to defend.

Plaz has done a fine job developing runners. Streich has run well, Derek Wiebke asked to try out for the team and was turned into a Big Ten mile champ. During the Gophers run of Big Ten team track titles they were scoring points all over the place, Mead, Rombough, Blankenship, Pachuta etc. And the comments about how anyone could coach those kids is not true, Rombough went on to absolutely nothing after college, and if I remember correctly Blankenship was broken by the Miss State program before returning to MN and getting good fast! He is not perfect, but he took over a team that hadn't had much success in CC since his time as a runner and has made it a perennial national qualifier team with runners/DMRs at the national track meet on a regular basis. I believe they have been top 8 indoors nationally twice and top 20 more then 5 times in track nationally under Plaz as director. But yes 6th at this years big ten CC was not a good performance...will be interesting to see how they come back at the region?

Don't judge a team by its front runner, judge it by the team.

"Plaz" is bad coach. Don't take it personally, there are plenty of D1 teams with bad coaches.

RunTheBoat wrote:...will be interesting to see how they come back at the region?

That went well...

First off congrats to the Gopher Women for their performance today at Regionals. Very happy for them. The Men unfortunately underperformed again. They were projected to make Nationals in a marginal region but again couldn’t get it done. It’s interesting to hear of the opinions of Plaz on this thread. I was on the team for his first 4 years and can definitely attest to the comments of him being awkward. It’s not like he is a bad guy because that isn’t the case at all but he just wasn’t the kind of coach that pressed the right buttons to maximize the performance of all of his runners. Granted he moved from Oregon to MN to coach our team for the first time but he just didn’t have that “It” factor. I think he applied what worked for him in his early coaching techniques and that just didn’t work for many of us. I have often thought that over the years he would morph his coaching in a more effective way but it just doesn’t seem like it is getting any better.