CU men’s team cracks top 20 at NCAA championship

NCAA CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIPS

The first year of the program reboot under new head coach Sean Carlson reached a conclusion for the Colorado cross country teams.

The CU men, along with women’s team representative Jessie Secor, competed at the NCAA cross country championship on Saturday in Madison, Wisc.

In an event dominated by the Buffaloes in the not-too distant past, the CU men finished 19th in the team standings while Secor placed 107th out of 254 timed finishers in the 6K women’s final.

Carlson took over this past summer just ahead of the cross country season to replace Mark Wetmore, who led CU cross country to eight team national championships with five individual titles in a three-decade run. Carlson has overseen a roster overhaul that still is ongoing, and Saturday’s result was actually an improvement for the CU men over last year’s final run with Wetmore, when the Buffs finished 25th.

Last year’s result marked just the second time since Wetmore’s 29 seasons leading CU cross country that the Buffs failed to land either team in the top 10 of the team standings.

That trend continued this year.

Still, the men cracked the top 20 with Dean Casey leading the way. One of several transfers who followed Carlson from Tennessee, Casey finished in 30th place, posting a 10K time of 29 minutes, 21.1 seconds that marked his top time with the Buffs. Lukas Huag, who competed in his first 10K, was CU’s next finisher at 105th (backed 29:57.0), followed by Isaiah Givens at 127th (30:04.9).

Secor, also a Tennessee transfer, finished in 20:34. She posted a CU career-best 6K mark of 20:10.2 at the Mountain Regional last week.

BYU swept both team titles, with the men’s squad finishing 124 points, followed by Iowa State (137), Arkansas (202), Wisconsin (212) and Northern Arizona (237). Harvard’s Graham Banks won the men’s title in 28:37.2.

The BYU women finished with 147 points, with the top five rounded out by West Virginia (164), Providence (183) Northern Arizona (206) and Oregon (210). Alabama’s Doris Lemngole won the individual title with a time of 19:21.0, which was 7.8 seconds better than runner-up Pamela Kosgei from New Mexico.