I disagree with the original poster's premise. If all training was equal, talent would be the decider. The reason why we try to train more and train smarter than our opponents is so that we can build an advantage over those who are more talented than us, try to beat those who are of equal talent, and to stay ahead of those who are less talented and also training hard. For an individual to see a jump in performance, some sort of adaptation has to take place and at the college level, that adaptation is probably going to come from changes in training stimuli. In high school, boys can maintain the same training and continue to improve year by year simply on the merits of physical maturation, but by the time that those boys are college age men, most of that maturation is complete so it is no longer a viable means of improvement for most. When athletes transition from high school to college, they often make drastic and immediate changes to their training, which can result in major improvements even when met with some stagnation at the beginning as the athlete adjusts to the new load. By the time sophomore cross country is over, most of that transition is complete as well. There are certainly athletes who take longer than that to adjust to training and still have a big jump coming, but they are probably not the athletes who are at All-American level. Those athletes will still progress their training over the years, and may still improve, but probably not so drastically as to propel a top 15 or 20 finisher to the front of the race. The most note-worthy exception might be for the athlete who talented enough to finish in an All-American position, but has not been healthy enough to either perform to their ability or train at the same volume of other All-American type runners. German Fernandez could be an example of that situation. He was talented enough to run with just about everyone by his sophomore year, but his health and fitness did not allow it. I don't think anything that the anonymous coach or Robert and Weldon stated is inconsistent with what they have said all along.