The Oswego State women’s cross country team will head to Geneseo Saturday for the SUNYAC Championships after an encouraging season.
In a team that featured half freshmen and half returning members, second-year head coach Sarah Ritchie stressed that the improvement the team has seen both from last season and throughout the year has been phenomenal.
“The improvements that the returners have made is minutes worth which is just exciting to see,” Richie said. “The freshmen are improving every meet.”
Junior Morgan Bronner echoed her coach’s testaments of all of the many important strides the team has taken from the previous two years.
“Everybody has been improving so that’s really awesome to see and I think it’s exciting,” Bronner said.
Ritchie and the team hope the improving trends will continue into the SUNYAC Championships. Last season, the team finished in ninth out of tenth place in the championship meet. Even though the other SUNYAC teams have also shown improvement this year, she believes there is no reason why their team cannot at least marginally improve in the standings this season.
“We are confident that we can definitely get eighth so we are setting our goals up so we can get seventh,” Richie said.
Last match, the women’s cross country team had four members place in the top 15 of the program’s history, including senior Lauren McNamara’s time of 23:34.1. This was a drop of 90 seconds from 2015 to 2016 and good for fourth all-time. Bronner posted the sixth fastest time in program history at 23:57.1. These results show that the women’s cross country team has the potential to keep the momentum going.
“We have the best team this program has ever seen,” Richie said. “Having four of the top 15 times in program history is huge and hopefully we get one more this week and we will have five people in the top 15 of all-time history which would just be amazing.”
Some women’s cross country teams in the SUNYAC have over 30 members on their team, including SUNY Geneseo’s team which is currently No. 3 in the nation. The Lakers only have eight women on their team this year, which is less than some previous years. It makes meets a challenge, but it illustrates just how amazing a feat it is and the level of magnitude of their accomplishments.
“Having only eight girls, you look forward to every one of their races,” Richie said. “It really makes it exciting to see and know each of these girls personally and see what they can do.”
The training for the team starts in June with team practices starting in August. With such a small number of members, the group of girls have become like a family to one another.
“I just want to see how well we can all do as a team and individually we try and push each other,” freshman Jamie Kasza said.
The pressure continues to mount before the championship, but Ritchie emphasized that the team is not worried going into the meet, but instead they are loose and confident before this weekend.
“I think I am going to come and have them in the team huddle five minutes before the meet begins and I’m just going to go, ‘SUNYAC’s, am I right?’ and walk away,” Ritchie joked. “We’ve done all the work we can, so we need to use all the things we have done already and make sure all of this work pays off.”
Ritchie and her team hope their hard work and improving results pay off with an exciting showing at the SUNYAC Championships.
