NAU Track and Field

Thoughts from Friday’s Wisconsin adidas Invitational (where the women finished 28th and the men finished 8th) from Head Coach Eric Heins:

Women’s race:

In what most are calling the most competitive regular season cross country race in history, our young women’s team held their own. Not only are we young physically (three true freshman in the top seven) we are also young as it relates to big meet experience; only Haley Lawrence and Kortnee Burton have ever raced in the Pre Nationals Invite sections. Taking this into account, I am extremely proud of how this group of young ladies competed. In a meet of this caliber you must be able to get out hard and hang on or start out controlled and be confident enough to move through the field. I thought we moved through the field very well and a quick look at the splits shows that as well. Rochelle and Kortnee were both in the 100’s early on before finishing 41st and 67th respectively and only getting passed by a few people over the last half of the race. The same can be said for Caroline, Agnes and Haley as they were closed to 300th at the 1200m mark of the race and finished 161st, 164th and 189th respectively. Looking at the 3k splits, they each passed a lot of runners over the last half of the race and were passed by very few. I felt if we finished 25th, we would have run a good race and if we finished in the top 20, we would have set ourselves up for a national championship qualifying run. We finished 28th and 36 points out of finishing 25th. As well as we ran, in a meet like this where 10 seconds can equal 25 points, I truly believe we left some points out on the course and still have some room to improve. We had a 1-5 split of exactly 60 seconds, which is great, but we had a 1-3 split of 49 seconds. In order to become a better team we either need to have someone step up and be a true #3 runner for us, or we need to have our pack of 3-5 runners all move up to within 45 seconds of our number 1. This team is a good team and we have two more races to show exactly how good.
Our next meet is the Big Sky Championships and coming off this experience we will be ready for the challenge of competing against the defending champions – Montana, Pre-Season favorites – Weber State and the host school – Idaho State. This could very well be one of the closest Big Sky Meets in history, meaning every point will be extremely important.

Men’s race:

We entered this meet as the 7th ranked team on paper and we wanted to finish in that spot. We slipped one spot and finished 8th overall, behind a couple of good performances from an up and coming University of Texas team and a senior laden Princeton team. Once again, we were able to pull off some wins against other potential NCAA Championship qualifying teams. This is the number one goal when competing at these races, but we also have big goals as a team and need to do a better job of finishing races. At the 5k point in the race, we were 5th overall and faded to 8th. This is not typical of the Lumberjacks. Jordan was 23rd and finished 39th (16 spots), Tim was 42nd and finished 66th (24 spots), Matt was 60th and finished 162nd (101 spots). Giving up 141 points over the last 3000 meters is not how we want to end our races. Fortunately John Yatsko and Andrew Belus moved through the field nicely and rounded out our scoring at 99th and 125th securing a top 10 finish. If we hold our positions that we were in through 5k and John is our number 5 man at 99th we finish 4th in this meet. There is no doubt in my mind that we can do that in another 5 weeks. We cannot hang our heads, but continue to work on the things we need to do in order to become a better team and have a strong finish to the season.

Results and recap over at NAUAthletics.com.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – In following the leadership of All-American Diego Estrada and two-time Big Sky Cross Country Athlete of the Week Rochelle Kanuho, the Northern Arizona University men’s and women’s cross country teams should stack up well against a slew of national talent at the Wisconsin Adidas Invitational on Friday in Madison, Wisc.”Our men and women competed well two weeks ago in Oklahoma, so we’re looking for another strong showing to back those up,” said Director of Track and Field and Cross Country Eric Heins.  “Going to Wisconsin will allow us to compete against, and hopefully defeat, some other top teams from outside of our region.”

Continue reading at NAUAthletics.com

I will be posting blog updates throughout the weekend with pictures and maybe some interviews with the team.

Go Jacks!