Contributor: The Nerd
No room for fear or doubt
The State meet is sixteen days away. You've got a handful of hard workouts remaining. In the next sixteen days your coach will help you sharpen your fitness, rest your body and finalize your race strategy for Districts and State.
You've been focused on the next two weeks since June. Every mile of summer conditioning, every success and failure during seven weeks of racing, every good and bad workout has prepared you for what lies ahead.
You may be ranked and feel the weight of being a favorite for a State medal. You might be fighting for the last spot on your team's District roster. This might be the last week of your season. perhaps the last week of your cross country career.
You can't always control how your body will perform on race day. You might get sick. Your legs might be dead. It happens to the best of us.
What you can control is your attitude. To that point, several years ago we wrote "No Room for Fear or Doubt." As you encounter the inevitable pre-race jitters, perhaps this article will give you comfort.
A primer for State qualifying
In contrast to track and field, the criteria for qualifying for the State XC meet are fairly simple. If your team is in the top three at Districts or you're one of the first 15 finishers, you qualify.
There are four Districts in Class A and B, five Districts in Class C and six Districts in Class D, so each State race will have 12, 15 or 18 team qualifiers. The number of teams in each District varies greatly by Class. Class A and B have 7 or 8 teams per District, Class B has 6 or 7, Class C has around 12 and Class D has 18 or more. The max number of competitors also varies by Class: Class A runs 7 and scores the top 5, Class B & C run 6 and score 4, and Class D runs 5 and scores 3. If a school doesn't have the minimum number of scorers, they won't have a team score.
District assignments
The NSAA released the District assignments for Class A and B on Tuesday, so we now know the path that every team must take to qualify for State.
The Class A and B assignments are primarily based on the the fastest two meets for each team, defined as the average time of the scorers in that meet. For Class A in 2024, the girls' seeding take priority so the NSAA uses a serpentine seeding system to assign all Class A girls teams between the four Districts at two locations (Pioneer Park and Walnut Creek). Since they don't want to send the boys team to a different site, that means the boys teams are assigned to the same site as their girls team but the assignment between the two races at that District will be changed for competitive balance based on boys seedings. The boys and girls seeding priorities change each year, so in 2025 the boys seeding will take priority.
For Class B, at least as I understand it, the teams were divided between an eastern Nebraska location (Walnut Grove) and a western Nebraska location (Overton) based on school geography. Within each site, teams were assigned to one of the two District races to maintain competitive balance. Like Class A, the girls may run in a different District than their male teammates.
You may not like the approach but most coaches support these methods. In fact, a few years ago Class B moved to the Class A approach after the "Massacre at the Mount" in 2021 when girls teams ranked #2, #3, #4 and #5 were assigned to the same District at Mount Michael. This year the boys A4 District includes four teams ranked in the Top 10 by the coaches - #2 Lincoln East, #8 North Platte, #9 Creighton Prep and #10 Millard North. According to the seed times they're #3, #5, #10 and #11. The A2 District at that location includes teams seeded #2, #7, #8 and #15 by time but only Lincoln North Star (#2) and Lincoln Southwest (#6) are ranked in the coaches poll. Less than half of the Class A coaches participate in the subjective rankings, so they're not a great benchmark for whether there's a competitive balance among the Districts.
If you're interested in the seedings by time, here are the links to the raw data:
Class C and D Districts are assigned based solely on geography. The D4 District has a whopping 22 teams vying for three State berths. The odds for qualifying for State are not great.
Photos
The Nerds worked their tails off this week, posting pictures from meets at Malcolm, UNK, Ord, West Holt, Crofton, Boys Town, TVC (Hebron), Raymond Central, LPS city meet, Syracuse, Stanton, South Sioux City, Columbus and Millard West. We still owe you photos from the Millard West JV races and David City Aquinas. You can see all of our albums at https://www.facebook.com/PrepRunningNerd/photos_albums. If you see us at a meet, give us a 'Howdy Nerd' or write a shoutout on your arm or leg. Here's a sampling of the Nerds' great work:
Results
As usual, we've linked results to every high school meet we could find on our webpage at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/xcresults. That page also includes all of the meets being held this week. We counted 19 meets being held on Thursday, October 10, and we'll be at seven of them.
Notable results
We wrote a summary of the UNK results in our last Nerdsletter linked here. Here a few other races that stood out to us:
At Thursday's West Holt meet, D#1 Delani Runnels of Niobrara-Verdigre continued her undefeated season, winning by six seconds over D#7 Angela Frick of North Central. C#9 Autumn Gasper, a freshman at Boone Central, continued her impressive season by finishing 3rd in 20:23, 22 seconds behind Runnels. D#3 Kaser Johnson and D#5 Tice Yost of Doniphan-Trumbull were the top two boys finishers.
D#3 Sage Holtmeier and D#11 Sammy Holsing of Tri County swept the titles at the Lincoln Lutheran meet. D#13 Isabelle Peters of Tri County and C#5 Payton Day of Omaha Concordia each finished 2nd.
Gothenburg appears to be getting stronger as they head into the post-season. At their home meet, C#1 sophomore Tyler Hetz (16:58) and C#9 freshman Bryson Neels (17:27) took the top two boys spots. In the girls race, C#3 Scout Bell won the individual title and leading the Swedes to a team title with her teammates finishing 9th, 10th and 12th. Gothenburg's top five girl finishers are all freshman or sophomores. D#2 Ashley Robertson of Wallace finished 2nd ahead of a handful of ranked girls.
At Syracuse, B#5 Joe Majerus of Pius blazed to a 15:39 win followed by teammate and B#4 David Krier in 15:41. B#6 Josiah Quinones and B#11 Lucas Frazier of Beatrice took the next two spots in 15:46 and 16:13. B#8 Malia Woosley of Pius won the girls title in 19:46 followed by B#9 Mallory Robbins (19:58) of Plattsmouth, C#2 Alexis Ericksen (20:01) of Aurora and C#6 Liston Crotty (20:05) of Auburn.
At the Millard West meet, Millard West and Millard North had 10 of the top 12 boys finishers, led by A#10 Michael Jones (MW, 16:29), Mason Hutfles (MN, 16:47) and Marc Louthan (MN, 16:48). Millard West took the title with 5 in the top 9, and they'll be fighting for 2nd place at State. A#1 Kate Ebmeier of Millard West won by 40 seconds in 18:49, followed by A#9 Marissa Garcia (19:29) of Papio South and #11 Litzey Fredette (19:35) of Millard West. Millard West took 6 of the first 7 spots and still appears to be the favorite heading into State.
At the LPS meet, the Lincoln North Star boys and Lincoln Southwest girls flexed their muscles. A#2 Josiah Bitker was one of four LNS boys in the top five, with Ben Schlegelmilch of Lincoln East barging in to the Gator party for 4th place. LNS' 5th, 6th and 7th runners finished 21st, 22nd and 24th, so they have some work to do to challenge Fremont for the State title. A#6 Meredith Marsh and A#10 Hannah Soucie (a freshman) ran 19:25 and 19:33, respectively, to lead LSW. A#8 Hope Riedel of LNS has raced sparingly this season due to an injury but finished 3rd in 19:57.
The Columbus meet on Friday featured a number of teams that raced four days earlier at UNK so times were slower for the field. A#1 Juan Gonzalez and A#4 Noah Miller of Fremont ran together for the entire race before Miller slowed in the final few meters to give Gonzalez the win that Gonzalez had been trying to give to Miller; they both finished in 16:40. A#7 Tatum Nielson of Bellevue West picked up her first career varsity win in 19:52, followed by Sydney Peck of Norfolk in 20:30 and Lucy Fierro of Westview in 20:33.
Rankings
We issued our updated individual rankings on Tuesday with a strong bias towards the results from the UNK meet on 9/30. While the UNK meet didn't feature every ranked runner, it featured the majority of them in Class B, C and D. Quite a few teams raced again later in the week with some head-to-head results that were different than what we saw in Kearney. When that happened, we gave more weight to the UNK results since it was a more competitive race on same course as the State meet.
There were several examples of highly-ranked runners who didn't perform well at UNK. In a few instances, we downgraded their rankings but didn't remove them from the Top 15. If an athlete has been ranked in the Top 5 for most of their high school career, they didn't become a slow runner because of one race. They simply had a bad day.
As we noted at the start of the season, rankings are subjective. While we base them on actual results and look closely at head-to-head matchups, there is no science behind them. If you spend as much time covering XC as we do, your rankings could be just as valid as ours. The primary purpose of rankings is to promote the sport and give recognition to athletes that don't get much attention from traditional media. The only rankings that really matter are State results but... they don't really matter. Cross country runners are defined by their heart, effort and improvement, not by medals and times.
One thing we definitely don't like about rankings is when someone is rude because they don't like where their teammate or relative is ranked (or isn't). That happened last Friday at a meet that Joyful Nerd was shooting. A high school athlete had the misguided idea that it would be productive to disrespect a Nerd volunteer to defend his teammate's honor. It was a bad look and I hope we don't see it again. The Nerds give too much of their time to be criticized for this small part of what we do.
State JH meet
We love the State high school XC meet in Kearney only slightly more than we love the State junior high meet being held this Saturday at Papio South. There are four JH races - two championship races at 1:00 and 1:25 and two open races at 1:50 and 2:15. This race truly is a glimpse into the future. For example, out of the top 15 finishers in the 2021 boys championship race, 11 are in the high school rankings this week. The top 15 finishers in the 2017 girls race included four future high school State champs in XC or T&F: Berlyn Schutz (Lincoln East), Maddie Seiler (Gering), Alayna Vargas (Hastings Saint Cecilia) and Jaci Sievers (Elkhorn North). Nebraska basketball player Britt Prince finished 3rd and 4th in her two appearances.
The meet will have at least 3,000 athletes and spectators on the Papio South campus. There is ample parking and no admission fee to see some of the best junior high athletes from all across Nebraska. The Cornhuskers have a bye week so use your free time to soak in this great atmosphere.
Still aren't sold? Check out our video recap from the 2023 meet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3uhzmxMeUw&t=58s
Odds and ends
A few minor things to share:
Injuries always play a major role in cross country, particularly repetitive use injuries like stress fractures and broken bones. We're heartened to hear that Ella Ford (Elkhorn North) and Ethan Smith (GINW) are hoping to return this week from significant injuries they incurred this summer. The Nerds want everyone healthy and racing.
The Nerds are, well, very Nerdy. Joyful Nerd couldn't have more excited to shoot the Columbus meet last Friday because the course winds through active farmland. The crop generally alternates each year between corn and beans, and this was supposed to be a bean year. You can imagine how elated Joyful Nerd was when she saw that this year's course was lined with both corn and beans.
As we posted on social media, we're more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, but we won't pass up a chance to share our love of cross country with a wider audience. Former high school and collegiate runner Kelsey Mannix of KMTV3 in Omaha reached out to us as part of her series "For the Love of Competition," so several of us met with her during the Boys Town meet last Thursday. While this quote didn't survive the final cut, I told her that the Nerds weren't anything special when it was just three of us living in the same house. The true strength of our group are the 20+ volunteers living around Nebraska who volunteer 10-30 hours each week to capture these great athletes. Here's the link to Kelsey's story: https://www.3newsnow.com/sports/for-the-love-of-competition-volunteers-put-spotlight-on-running-in-nebraska
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First published at www.preprunningnerd.com by Jay Slagle on October 9, 2024. If you find an error, shoot us an e-mail at jayslagle@hotmail.com and we'll get it fixed.
Like this coverage of the Nebraska cross country scene? There's more of this at www.preprunningnerd.com. Check out the Blog tab for our frequent stories and the Results tab for every Nebraska high school meet we can find. If you want to see meet photos or just need to kill a few hours on social media, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @PrepRunningNerd or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/preprunningnerd.
Finally, if you think runners, jumpers and throwers are the best things on earth, you'll enjoy our two most popular articles. In 2018 we published "The Runner with the Broken Heart" about a high school boy who finished last in nearly every race he ran. In 2022 we published, "The Fall and Rise of Emmett Hassenstab," a story about a high school triple jumper who became a quadrapalegic after a swimming accident.