Durango graduate Laura Thweatt, this week's Big XII female runner of the week, will be helping the University of Colorado to climb a bit in the polls at this weekend's Pre-Nats meet in Terre Haute. File photo by Alan Versaw.
This weekend is a study in contrasts for Colorado's collegiate cross country programs. The Division II schools have an open weekend in anticipation of next Saturday's RMAC championship meet in Denver. But, with the exception of Northern Colorado, the state's Division I programs are all headed to Indiana for some high-stakes competition at the Pre-Nationals meet.
Pre-Nationals is an important meet for more than just measuring yourselves against other teams. More importantly, team placement in the Pre-Nats races weighs heavily in determining points for at-large bids to the national championship meet in November.
Without going into more detail than I'm competent to explain, each region sends two automatic qualifiers to the national championship meet. About 40% of the team entries at the national championship meet, however, come from at-large bids.
Teams receiving at-large bids have either defeated auto qualifer teams earlier in the season or have been "pushed" in by other teams whom they beat at the regional meet. To be pushed in by another team, you must have defeated the pushing team at regionals, but the pushing team must have defeated some national qualifier(s) at some earlier point in the season. The point system is highly complex, but certainly gives meaning and motivation to meets like Pre-Nationals where large numbers of teams with national championship meet aspirations converge in a single meet.
In a region as strong as the Mountain Region* that Air Force, Colorado, and Colorado State each compete in, at-large bids are often necessary for very solid teams to earn a berth at the NCAA National Championships. While no team wants to fall back on an at-large bid, an at-large bid always beats not going at all. And, Air Force, CSU, and CU each have at least one team with some reasonable hope of reaching nationals this year. That should answer the question of whether or not this meet has meaning to these schools.
All three schools have been more or less keeping their top runners under wraps until this point. Yes, Jenny Barringer and Allie McLaughlin lit things up a little (at least by the historical standards of the meet) at the Rocky Mountain Shootout two weekends ago, but the real racing begins this weekend. Expect to see each team's strongest performances of the season to date this weekend.
We wish all the best to each of the Colorado Division I programs and to the many Colorado high school graduates that populate the rosters of these teams.
* - An interesting sidebar about the Mountain Region is that it is comprised of all NCAA Division I schools at an elevation of 3000 feet or higher. By this one stroke of alignment, the NCAA has placed all of the "high altitude" schools in the same region, thus relieving lower altitude schools from the necessity of having to travel, at some point, to higher elevations for a regional qualifying meet. The schools in the Mountain Region include, UTEP, Texas Tech, New Mexico State, New Mexico, Air Force, Colorado, Colorado State, Northern Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Montana State, Idaho State, Brigham Young, Utah Valley, Utah, Utah State, Southern Utah, Weber State, and Northern Arizona.