Riley Cooney's brilliant high school career will come to closure without an NXN appearance, but she managed a place in Saturday's top ten nevertheless. Photo by Alan Versaw.
If you've been paying attention, you already know 2014 was Colorado's quietest year yet at NXR-SW.
Colorado has no automatic advancers in the team category and only the most slender of hopes for an at-large bid for Monarch. If there's a region that will get two at-large bids, the Southwest ranks high on that list, but the reality is that it's doubtful any region will pull two at-large qualifiers and, frankly, it was a fair piece from Monarch's sharpest performance of the season.
Colorado qualified four individuals for NXN, but only three will be going. Lauren Gregory turned down her offer to run again at NXN in favor of focusing her attention on Foot Locker Midwest and, perhaps, Foot Locker Nationals. That leaves only Katie Rainsberger, Eric Hamer, and Paul Roberts flying from Colorado to Portland on December 4.
If you were wondering where the qualifiers are coming from who are displacing Colorado, the answer to that question lies directly west of us. Utah boasts the top four boys teams and two of the top three girls teams for NXR-SW 2014. Each year, Utah's grip on the NXR-SW podium seems to tighten a little. In the entire history of NXR-SW, Fort Collins has never failed to qualify a girls team for NXN. In fact, Fort Collins had only missed first place once. There will be no return to Portland this year, however, as Fort Collins fell to fifth in the team scoring.
Colorado's top performing school for 2014 was easily Mountain Vista, a team that claimed fifth in the boys championship race, sixth in the girls championship race, and first in the open boys. But, it was altogether too clear to Mountain Vista coach Jonathan Dalby that there is much ground to be made up on the Utah contingent.
There is still much encouraging in the fact that Katie Rainsberger and Lauren Gregory earned the top two girls individual places. And, Lexi Reed finished precisely one place out of an NXN bid. Riley Cooney finished 10th, and Allie Chipman cobbled together what is likely the best race of her career to date to finish 14th in 17:52. But, even among individuals, Colorado has been leaking some of its traditional dominance among girls individuals to an increasingly strong Utah contingent.
Eric Hamer and Paul Roberts had enough left at the end to secure individual qualifiers from Colorado. Zach Alhamra and Marcelo Laguera were close, but didn't have the wheels over the last 400 meters to stay with the eventual qualifiers. Joshua Joseph and Ben Butler were Colorado's only other entries to earn top-20 finishes.
This year, as perhaps in no previous year, there simply was no margin for error in the boys championship race. For 2.8 miles, the lead pack stayed close, nobody daring to attempt a break and knowing that it would be suicidal in this group to make a break without knowing you could carry it through to the finish line. As a result, the break came with about a quarter mile to go and we learned a lot about the raw foot speed of Colorado's top harriers. Hamer and Roberts can pick 'em up and put 'em down very nicely when the situation demands it.
Each of the four variations of the NXR-SW course to date have been versions of fast. The trend has gone fast, faster, and faster still. The new Casa Grande course seems to be incrementally faster than the Toka Sticks course of the last three years. Training for a low-altitude speed kind of course isn't necessarily easily here in Colorado, but it's something we're going to have to figure out how to do. And, it's only incrementally easier in Utah, but they seem to have managed well enough thus far.
For a few teams, there were some nice measures of redemption earned over disappointing state meet performers. No team ranks higher on this scale than the Air Academy girls. But, also discovering that they had more in the bank than state's balance sheet showed were the Mountain Vista and ThunderRidge girls and the Durango and Cheyenne Mountain boys.
Nevertheless, there is some off-season soul-searching to be done as Colorado figures out how to regain the upper hand among NXR-SW girls and gain a toehold against Utah's dominance in NXR-SW boys.