Michigan
NCAA Great Lakes Regionals
Wolverines to Go for 16th-Straight NCAA Berth at Great Lakes Regional
11/8/2017 3:39:00 PM | Women's Cross Country
» The No. 8-ranked Wolverines will look to extend their streak of consecutive NCAA Championships appearances to 16 years -- the third-longest active streak in the nation.
» Michigan can automatically advance to nationals by finishing top-two in the team standings or earning an at-large bid in third place or lower.
» Redshirt seniors Jamie Morrissey and Gina Sereno will once again lead the Maize and Blue after leading the squad to back-to-back Big Ten titles two weekends ago.
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THIS WEEK
Friday, Nov. 10 -- NCAA Great Lakes Regional (Terre Haute, Ind. / LaVern Gibson Championship Course) 11:15 a.m. ET
Meet Home | Live Results | Watch Live on Flotrack Pro
The national No. 8-ranked University of Michigan women's cross country team kicks off the NCAA postseason at the Great Lakes Regional on Friday (Nov. 10) in pursuit of a third-straight regional crown and a 16th-straight berth to the NCAA Championships.
Fresh off winning a second straight Big Ten team title two weekends ago, the Wolverines enter as the favorites in the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) Regional Rankings as they aim to extend a national championships qualifying streak that is the third-longest in the nation.
How they fare Friday at 11:15 a.m., over six kilometers (3.73 miles) of rolling hills at the LaVern Gibson Championship course, will determine the route by which -- or if -- Michigan will book its ticket to Louisville for nationals on Saturday, Nov. 18.
After a rocky regular-season finale at the Pre-National Invitational, the Wolverines bounced back in a big way to claim a resounding Big Ten team title. Led by the 1-2 punch of redshirt seniors Jamie Morrissey and Gina Sereno in third and fourth places, respectively, Michigan also showed strength in the rest of its scoring lineup with three women finishing back-to-back-to-back in 15th, 16th and 17th. The Wolverines were the only team with five finishers among the top 20.
"I think we've seen some growth from everybody coming out of the Big Ten meet, so we definitely aren't resting on our laurels of winning the conference title," head coach Mike McGuire said. "We want to be 12 days better than we were in Bloomington, and we're looking at this as a great opportunity for a continuation of our improvement curve."
As was the case at Big Tens, Michigan will face a potent lineup of competitors. Of the 31 teams in the region, five of them -- Michigan, No. 17 Wisconsin, No. 21 Michigan State, No. 25 Ohio State and No. 27 Eastern Michigan -- are ranked top-30 nationally.
Should they make it through that field to nationals -- more on the qualifying process below -- then they will have an opportunity to follow up on last year's national runner-up finish to Oregon by a single point.
Fans can watch the meet live on Flotrack Pro with a subscription, or follow the live results on TimingMD.net. 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 Great Lakes Regional, only seven runners are able to compete for each team. The Wolverines' seven-woman roster will be pulled from its 11-woman travel roster, which also doubles as their available pool of runners for the NCAA Championships.
Redshirt seniors Morrissey, Sereno, Sophie Linn, Haley Meier and Sarah Zieve will be joined by juniors Claire Borchers, Avery Evenson and Ellie Leonard, and sophomore Madeline Trevisan.
Standard NCAA scoring rules are in effect for the NCAA Great Lakes Regional, meaning a team's first five runners will comprise its team 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, etc.), 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.
Morrissey's breakthrough season continued unabated at the Big Ten Championships, as she moved up four spots in the final third of the race -- including the field's fastest split over the fifth of six kilometers -- to take third overall. She is on pace to outperform her 21st-place finish from this meet a year ago.
Sereno is rounding back into All-American form with a fourth-place finish at Big Tens, equal to what she placed last year en route to eighth at regionals and 30th at NCAAs.
The trio of Evenson, Trevisan and Borchers were key to Michigan's success at Big Tens, packing up at the end to finish within a second of one another in 15th, 16th and 17th. Evenson is right where she was last year at this point -- 14th at conference last year to 15th this year -- en route to ninth in the region and 18th nationally.
Trevisan is well ahead of her trajectory from last year's freshman postseason campaign, having gone from 35th at Big Tens in 2016 to 16th two weekends ago. She would ultimately finish 22nd in the region and 46th at nationals.
Borchers is having the biggest breakthrough season of anyone on the squad other than Morrissey, improving to 17th at Big Tens from 38th a year ago. If she's able to hold her sustained improvement through the remaining two meets of the year, she is certain to exceed her 39th-place regional and 166th-place national finishes from last season.
Qualifying for the NCAA Championships
The primary objective for the squad will be to finish either first or second in the team standings. Each of the nine regional meets around the country on Friday automatically advance two teams apiece to nationals, comprising 18 of the 31 total teams in the NCAA Championships field. Should the Wolverines be the winners or runners-up, they will sleep soundly Friday night knowing their berths to Louisville are secure.
Should Michigan finish third or lower in the 31-team field, then its national championship qualification aspirations are left to the fate of the at-large process, which determines the remaining 13 bids to the NCAA meet. More than a day will pass until the team knows whether nationals awaits them as the final NCAA field -- including the at-large berth recipients -- will be unveiled on Saturday (Nov. 11) by 3 p.m. ET on NCAA.com.
Though the women are projected to win the region, in the event of a third-place-or-lower finish, the women have relatively less wiggle room for at-large qualifying than do their Michigan men's teammates. While the men racked up a significant number of head-to-head victories over teams likely to earn NCAA berths -- which are the main factor in the at-large determination process -- the women's schedule did not provide as many opportunities for those head-to-head wins.
A top-three finish has historically been enough to qualify over the last decade, as not since 1998 have fewer than three Great Lakes Region teams advanced to the NCAA Championships. In fact, only three times over the last decade have there been fewer than four teams from the region at nationals.
In the event Michigan does not qualify for the NCAA Championships as a team, a route still exists for individual Wolverines to advance to nationals. The four highest-finish individuals who are not members of qualifying teams are selected from each region to move on to Louisville. With two additional at-large bids up for grabs between all nine of the regions, as many as six non-team-qualifying runners could move on.
A LOOK AHEAD
Saturday, Nov. 18 -- at NCAA Championships (Louisville, Ky.)
Social Post of the Week
Happy #NCAAXC Regionals Week!
— Michigan T&F / XC (@UMichTrack) November 7, 2017
Here's a look at the 6K course the women will be running in Terre Haute on Friday pic.twitter.com/UwJpMJUrk7
Players Mentioned
