She was 48 seconds faster than Sophia Kennedy’s course time last year, and Kennedy went 15:26 at BU in December.
You might be right. Using last year’s data points may not be most accurate since the times could be impacted by weather and surface conditions. Comparable performance against others could be more telling, assuming they are applying the same effort during the race. Sophia Kennedy’s 2025 outdoor 5k TiC is 15:09, and her 2024 Gans Creek TiC is 16:00 even.
I counted 13 east african sounding/looking names in the top 20 for the men at Gans Creek...
I love that they get opportunities, but it's hard (impossible) to cheer for them when they're as old as some of them are and decidedly not American- even last year, I found myself having a hard time sorting out the imports from the African Americans which made some of my cheering bordering on racism lol. I'm all in for BYU's squads this year since its all home grown talents.
Speaking of BYU, their women crushed a mid level field today. If they hadn't won that would have been a major problem- so some have rightly pointed out that the win (even at that big of a margin) doesn't mean a ton, but we aren't putting enough emphasis on the fact that Hedengren wasn't racing, and although it's unlikely, she does have talent to be all American or better (she beat several top 10 xc runners on the track after all), so she could be a massive point swing for them if the squad today raced a squad with Jane on it.
Here is my initial (and probably overly simple) reaction to BYU result of 9/26. Their 1-3 spread was 37 seconds (not zero has in opener!). Throw in Jane H and Jenna H as 1-2 and assume Jane would be around 20 seconds faster than Chamberlain gets a 1-5 spread approaching 1 minute. Assuming Jane would be near the leaders puts their 5th based on last year's results in the mid 60s - like last year. Jane would score maybe 10 less than LHL did last year, so their point total would be around 135-140 (147 last year). Factor in what could be even tougher competition this year would only drive the point total up (more runners between BYU 1 and 5). My guess has been it might take 115-125 to win this year.
On the Gans Creek course, still tough to figure out how good is low to mid 19s. But looking at just UVA, their runner to runner spreads were remarkable similar to what they were in their opener with the exception of Tatum David who was much faster yesterday. Will have to wait until ACC Champs to see how competitive they are but their opener times were not in most cases much faster than last year on the same course. But a number of teams who ran at Gans Creek yesterday will run at Nuttycombe where I think we know more about what times mean. My guess at this point is to add about 20-30 seconds to Gans Creek time to get Nuttycombe time so low 19s implies mid to high 19s. But we shall see.