Michigan
NCAA Championships
NCAA Championships Await No. 8 Wolverines in Louisville
11/16/2017 10:52:00 AM | Women's Cross Country
» UPDATE: Due to inclement weather forecast for the area on late Saturday morning, the race time has been moved up to 9 a.m.
» The national No. 8-ranked Wolverines will be going for their third top-four appearance at the NCAA Championships in the past five seasons.
» Redshirt seniors Gina Sereno and Jamie Morrissey lead a deep veteran squad to Louisville for the program's 16th consecutive appearance at NCAAs.
» The Wolverines' finishes at the last five NCAA Championships have met or improved upon their pre-championships national rankings in each respective year.
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THIS WEEK
Saturday, Nov. 18 -- NCAA Cross Country Championships (Louisville, Ky. / E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park) 10:45 a.m. 9 a.m.
Meet Home | Live Results | Course Maps | Watch Live on Flotrack Pro
A season's worth of both jubilant highs and challenging adversity for the No. 8-ranked University of Michigan women's cross country team has all led up to this Saturday (Nov. 18) as the Wolverines spike up one last time in 2017 for the NCAA Cross Country Championships in Louisville, Kentucky.
With last fall's one-point national runner-up finish to Oregon in Terre Haute, Ind., now nearly a full year gone in the rearview, this year's iteration of the Wolverines -- led by redshirt seniors Gina Sereno and Jamie Morrissey -- are determined to chart their own legacy when they toe the line at 9 a.m. for the six-kilometer (3.73-mile) circuit through E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park in what will be their 16th-consecutive nationals appearance.
(Due to inclement weather forecast in the Louisville area for late Saturday morning into the afternoon, the race time was moved from 10:45 a.m. to 9 a.m.)
With two returning All-Americans in Sereno and redshirt junior Avery Evenson, the development of Morrissey into an All-America caliber cross country runner, and the mark of national-level experience running through the entire seven-woman lineup, the 2017 Michigan squad is poised to both write its own chapter of Michigan history while continuing the programs long-standing legacy of triumphs on the trails.
Slotted in at No. 8 in the pre-championships National Coaches' Poll published by the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA), the Wolverines will look to extend a streak of five consecutive seasons in which their finish at NCAAs met or improved upon their national rank entering the meet.
Much has changed for the Wolverines since they last ran the grounds of E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park a month ago for the Pre-National Invitational. Though Michigan departed from Louisville on Oct. 14 disappointed with a fifth-place (one point away from sixth-place) finish on a day it had hoped to test its mettle against the likes of top-ranked Colorado and defending national champion Oregon, it also departed the regular season with a reinvigorated sense of focus heading into the postseason.
"There wasn't a panic coming out of Pre-Nationals," McGuire said. "We had some people who had some issues with the heat, and those types of issues are correctable. They're correctable because these are women who have run at an accomplished level, and they are resilient and can bounce back from disappointment."
In the interim, Morrissey and Sereno hit their stride as a frontrunning duo and the depth that carried the Wolverines within a point of last season's national title began to reemerge as the squad claimed both the Big Ten and Great Lakes Region team titles for the second year in a row.
Thus, they return to Louisville this Saturday with the momentum and confidence of a team poised to earn a spot on the four-team podium for the third time in the past five years. Only five other programs in the country -- No. 1 Colorado, No. 2 New Mexico, No. 4 Stanford, No. 6 Oregon and No. 9 Providence, all of which are in contention again this year -- have had a comparable run of success in the past half-decade.
"I think it will take our best race of the year to hit the podium, and once you hit the podium anything can happen," McGuire said. "Going in you want to finish higher than you were ranked, and it's always nice coming home with a trophy."
Fans can watch the meet live on Flotrack Pro with a subscription, or follow the live results on NCAA.com. Live updates from the course will be posted to the program's social media accounts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook throughout the week leading up to and including the race.
THE LINEUP
For the NCAA Championships, only seven runners are able to compete for each team. Redshirt seniors Morrissey, Sereno, Sophie Linn, Haley Meier and Sarah Zieve will be joined in the pool of available runners by juniors Evenson and Claire Borchers, and sophomore Madeline Trevisan.
Standard NCAA scoring rules are in effect for nationals, meaning a team's first five runners will comprise its score. Each of those top-five runners will be assigned a point value equal to their finish positions (first is one point, second is two, and so on), with the sum of those five runners' point totals making up the team score.
The next two runners (six and seven) will serve as displacers in the team scoring. Though their point totals will not contribute to the team score, they will be key in pushing opposing teams' scoring runners who finish behind them back one spot each in the standings -- a vital advantage in a competition in which each and every point is important.
One of the Wolverines' biggest advantages on Saturday will be the duo of Sereno and Morrissey. The pair has raced and finished essentially side-by-side in each of the last two races, with Morrissey and Sereno going 3-4 at Big Tens and vice versa for a 2-3 finish at Regionals.
After those two run through, the Wolverines hope to put the trio of Borchers, Trevisan and Evenson across the line in a pack not long afterward, emulating the formula that led the Wolverines to the Big Ten title last month.
"There are different ways to do well at this meet," McGuire said. "I don't anticipate we'll get started with a single-digit scorer, given how deep the field is nationally, so all year long we've said that we need to replace Erin Finn by committee. A big part of the committee has been Jamie and Claire being just so much better than they were a year ago. It all comes down to who steps up on Saturday. We add more members to the committee, we're going to be in good shape."
After a couple "off" races during the midst of the regular season, Sereno is back in the same type of groove that led her to a 30th-place finish at the NCAA Championships a year ago as she has held stronger at the front of the pack in each of her two postseason races so far.
Sereno has proven herself in NCAA cross country -- not to mention as a five-time individual Big Ten champion and four-time All-American on the track -- while Morrissey's national breakthrough is just beginning.
By the design of the 2017 schedule, the Wolverines made regular-season visits to each of the courses that would eventually host the Big Ten (Bloomington, Ind.), NCAA Great Lakes (Terre Haute) and NCAA Championships. Morrissey ran significantly faster and stronger on her postseason visits to those same courses in Bloomington and Terre Haute, boding well for her 12th-place finish at Pre-Nationals a month ago.
Borchers' improvement has been just as marked as Morrissey's in 2017, as the pair were Michigan's seventh and sixth runners on last year's national runner-up team, respectively. The junior took 15th at regionals, a performance that built on her 17th-place finish at Big Tens.
NCAAs is where sophomore Trevisan shone brightest a year ago, finishing as the meet's sixth-best freshman in 46th place. She is on pace for an equally impressive finish in 2017, having finished 22nd at regionals both this year and in 2016.
Meier has been on a dramatic upward improvement curve over the last month, culminating in last Friday's 29th-place finish as Michigan's fifth runner at regionals. Running on a flatter, faster course (pending the impact of rain on the course) than last week, Meier's mid-distance speed should come in handy in Louisville.
Evenson and Linn bring big-race experience as members of the 2016 and 2015 NCAA Championships teams, respectively. Though she has not yet rounded into the same form that propelled her to an 18th-place finish at nationals a year ago, Evenson's finish a year ago was a dramatic improvement at the time, as well, after she took ninth at regionals.
Social Post of the Week
Congrats to @USTFCCCA #NCAAXC Great Lakes Region Women's Coach of the Year Mike McGuire!
— Michigan Track & Field / Cross Country (@UMichTrack) November 14, 2017
11th time he's won the award, third time in a row #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/jUTizCagRG
Players Mentioned
