D3 XC 2010

Liz Lawton has beaten all D3 competition the entire year. It seems like she hadn't had a bad race up until the NCAA meet. At the national championship level, anyone can have their day, and anyone can have not their best day (same day, just look at the men's race ie Haverford, Mike Spain). It appears obvious to me that Lawton simply didn't have her best day on Nov. 20th. At the same time I think it's pretty low to come on here and so harshly bash a runner who finished 6th in the strongest D3 field in the country and earned All-American honors. What it really cuts the cake is that she's a female; didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?

oi;raglfsajkld wrote:

words really fail in this case. this was an epic, colossal melt-down. has there ever been a bigger crash at an ncaa meet?

silly ralphy...i'm talking about st. lawrence not liz lawton. personally i think she's great!

Never too early to start talking about next year.

Here's my preliminary top ten:

1. NCC - Returns 5 of their top 7. Best coach in the country. Obviously very deep team.

2. SLU - Having two guys that finished in top 12 is a great start. Also returning a top 50 guy and their 7th man. Will they have depth to win it all?

3. Calvin - Great program, returning 5 of top 7, including Kramer (all-american and regional winner).

4. Haverford - Graduates top three but still has two returning all-americans. May be the deepest team in country (them or NCC). Can Donnelly get their non-nationals guys to take the next step?

5. Oshkosh - Returning top 5 guys from 11th place team, including Stymiest, one of the favorites for indiv. title next year. Historically, a very solid program.

6. Dickinson - Bringing back 5 of their top 7, including two freshmen. Becoming a great rival to Haverford in the Centennial conference.

7. Washington U - Returning their top 3 guys, including Burnstein, now a two-time all-american. Didn't take the expected leap forward after last year's 8th. Can they next year?

8. Elizabethtown - Brings back 6 of 7 from 14th-place team, including Reichert, who could challenge for indiv. title.

9. Williams - Returning everyone from this year's rebuilding effort (and 18th place finish). A traditional power.

10. NYU - Just gets the nod over Atlantic rival Geneseo, on account of depth. Returning 5 of 7, including Zitek, a near-all-american.

Could also make noise:

Geneseo

Wabash

Platteville

Steven's Point

Middlebury

Unfortunately for SLU, they had a perfect storm of things that could have gone wrong...go wrong. Pavlus ran her race as usual and took the title. Their #2 had bronchitis and fell way off after trying to stay with the tier 2 pack. Their #3 had been battling anemia for the past two years and this year it has gotten the better of her. Unfortunate, as who knows how good she could have been. The next three runners were all freshman, and ran scared. To me, it looks like the pressure of being the #2 team got to them. To be honest, I am surprised they held the #2 spot for so long and ran the number of quality races they did through out the year. Terrible timing, for sure. Sometimes things go your way, like they did last year for SLU (minus that elusive #5 runner). It helped that no one really knew how good the team was in Ohio. That wasn't the case this year...They have a solid crop of runners and the rumor of some serious talent coming in. Will they be good enough to compete without Pavlus? Who knows...

The guys look to be just at good next year. They return 2 top finishers and the Kenyan kid who was their number 3 has eligibility. I wonder if he will return? If so, they could be very, very good. This year's finish should help with recruiting, for sure. They have a very good freshman who was in the top 7 before developing a stress fracture at the end of the season. They certainly are deep.

in addition to two returning x-c all-americans, haverford also has Ivo Milic-Strkalj, all american in the mile indoors and 1500 outdoors as a freshman last year.

and for what it's worth hulleberg actually still has a year of eligibility left

Pretty sure Warstler from NCC still has a 5th year of cross. It will be interesting to see if he uses it.

nice analysis. thanks for doing the legwork for us! what do you see on the women's side?

Say hello to another year of 5 MW Region teams being in the top 10.

Apples and Oranges wrote:

If you convert the Haverford times from NCAA's and put them in the D1 NCAA meet they would have run fairly well. I have them in 21st place. The goats would have beat schools like Duke, Villanova, and Providence. Who knows how fast Anders could have run given the competition there?

I think you're about right. 24:20 for Hulleberg equates to 30:50 age-graded. Haverford's 30 second spread for runners 1 - 5 would be 40 seconds over 10K. So the average time would be about 31:10, which would put them around 20th place in DI.

Alfons wrote:

Most of the guys who went out @ 15:20 in DI race ran 31:xx. If we assume Haverfurd guys rans average 31:45 (reasonable), they would score roughly 700 points. They would have to try very hard to beat Cal (who as usual probably had a long list of excuses)

there is no way their DIII champ performance would have made the cut at regionals even.

Great race for sure, but listen to what you are saying, "They would have sucked at the DI level!"

I think, based on my previous post, that they'd score about 550 points, which would put them 23rd.

Ron Swanson wrote:

Say hello to another year of 5 MW Region teams being in the top 10.

which 5? NCC, Oshkosh, Wash U and . . .

who will be coaching Oshkosh? With Zupanc stepping down will that hurt the program?

Look for Geneseo to be higher. Returning 2 AA's plus their 5-6-7 from earlier in the year all got hurt, and all are returning. A pretty solid top 10 pick for right now, how far they move up depends on how much the rest of their top 7 can close on that strong top 2.

Any of you stop calculating to realize that the DI race was extremely windy, a tougher course, and pretty slow. Also, it definitely helps to be running in the front for the win. Great job to Haverford, they ran a great race. I'd love to see them mix it up in DI. They might be able to take down some good teams. But you number crunchers need to hold off until track.

[quote]I think you're about right. 24:20 for Hulleberg equates to 30:50 age-graded. Haverford's 30 second spread for runners 1 - 5 would be 40 seconds over 10K. So the average time would be about 31:10, which would put them around 20th place in DI.[quote]

They ran a great race and deserve a lot of credit, but lets be realistic here. A total of 2 of Haverford's NCAA runners either broke 14:50/31:10 ON THE TRACK last spring. It seems like a bit of a reach to say that they'd avg. 31:10 on a cross course.

Name:::::::::::::::::::::::::: wrote:

They ran a great race and deserve a lot of credit, but lets be realistic here. A total of 2 of Haverford's NCAA runners either broke 14:50/31:10 ON THE TRACK last spring. It seems like a bit of a reach to say that they'd avg. 31:10 on a cross course.

Mike Spain ran about 30:00 last spring and Hulleberg, who ran 30:30 beat him solidly. Haverford's spread was 30 seconds. Do the math!

Huh. I thought this was a DIII thread--surprised to see pointless speculation about performances vs. DI...

Probably time for this thread to go bye-bye. Well over a thousand posts, though--nice work, OP!

hrts wrote:

Huh. I thought this was a DIII thread--surprised to see pointless speculation about performances vs. DI...

Probably time for this thread to go bye-bye. Well over a thousand posts, though--nice work, OP!

Who asked you dickus?

Name:::::::::::::::::::::::::: wrote:

[quote]I think you're about right. 24:20 for Hulleberg equates to 30:50 age-graded. Haverford's 30 second spread for runners 1 - 5 would be 40 seconds over 10K. So the average time would be about 31:10, which would put them around 20th place in DI.[quote]

They ran a great race and deserve a lot of credit, but lets be realistic here. A total of 2 of Haverford's NCAA runners either broke 14:50/31:10 ON THE TRACK last spring. It seems like a bit of a reach to say that they'd avg. 31:10 on a cross course.

None of Haverford's five All Americans made All-American last year. Hulleberg was 89th. So obviously they improved from a year ago. People close to that program would tell you they put in a full year of work. They were better in the Spring than they were the previous Fall. But at that point they were still building, most of the work and all of the payoff was still to come. If you're looking for a basis for comparison for Haverford's cross country team, track times from last Spring don't capture most of their huge year-over-year improvement.

In fact, by design and intention they were not even sharp yet at Paul Short, their first competitive race of the season, which makes that day a bad basis for comparison as well. They trained to be ready for three races: their conference meet, regionals and nationals.

Nobody finished in front of Hulleberg in any of those three races. As a team, they scored 23 points, 23 points and 87 points and their fifth man was within a half-minute of Hulleberg each time. If you want to compare them to anybody else you have to take their performances on those three weekends.

It's not a stretch to think that on November 22 they could have beaten a lot of teams that finished in front of them at Paul Short. Teams that would have been well-advised to train through Paul Short as Haverford did.