From the first day of workouts, Katie Hursey noticed that her fellow runners were ‘on a whole other level’ than they were a season ago.

Pat Dupont noticed the same thing on the men’s team. A group riddled with injuries and illnesses last year was finally healthy.

Each could tell that their respective teams had improved. The same bodies were there, just a year older, a year wiser, a year more experienced. But nobody predicted that a top-ten finish would be attainable.

‘The goals have changed a little bit,’ Chris Fox, Syracuse cross country head coach, said. ‘First, we just wanted to get to Nationals. Then we started to get better and figured maybe we can be top-15.’

After both Fox’s men’s and women’s teams finished first at the NCAA Northeast Regionals on Saturday, the men sit at No.9 in the nation, their highest ranking in school history, and the women at No. 12.

With the NCAA Championships looming, that pair of victories primes the Orange for a chance to crack the top 10, a statistic with significance to its members.

‘I think it gets you respect and makes you more well known,’ said Hursey. ‘In the past, teams haven’t thought of us. We hadn’t qualified for Nationals (and when we did) last year, we were one of the bottom teams. Being Top 10, you’re not just a team that qualified for Nationals. You’re a team that’s significant at Nationals.’

Significance hasn’t been a word tossed around in context with Syracuse this season, with many teams and coaches overlooking it as a contender despite its high finishes.

Even Fox and his team didn’t realize what they had until a month into the season.

‘We went to Wisconsin and won fairly easily against traditional powerhouse teams,’ Fox said of the men’s team. ‘We would have been happy to have been third there but we won and that kind of sent us on our way. That changed everything.

‘On the women’s side, we got second without running well against traditional powerhouses. Maybe everybody else thought we ran well, but we knew we were better than what we ran.’

For Hursey, it wasn’t until Pre-Nationals that she realized what her team was capable of. The women’s team placed fourth at the race, a vast improvement of their 11th place finish a year ago.

But the question swirling around the Orange has been whether they can finish. Injuries put a damper on a strong start last season, but the team feels it can pull through till the end this year.

‘There’s no reason we shouldn’t,’ said Hursey. ‘We haven’t had any injuries on the girls’ side or the boys’ side and we’ve been running strong.’

The health of the team has resulted in an increase in depth from last season which has proved to pay dividends, especially on the men’s side, which has had a different front-man in nearly each race it has competed in.

Stephen Murdock won the Harry Lang Invitational, followed by Griff Graves’ victory at the Colgate Invitational. Tito Medrano took third place at the Wisconsin Invitational and Dan Busby fifth at the Pre-Nationals. With the team’s top runners sitting out the John Reif Memorial, Michael Brocks placed third. Dupont took fourth at the Big East Championship and fifth at the Northeast Regional.

‘If everybody runs like a first man on the same day, then we can run really well,’ Dupont said.

Above all, though, while a Top 10 finish would ‘put an exclamation mark on a great season,’ as Fox described it, and exceed the expectations of even the team’s own members, it would make a statement to the rest of the nation as well.

Dupont wants to make the statement loud and clear: ‘We’re Syracuse University and we’re a player from now on.’

pcgeorge@syr.edu

Published on November 18, 2009 at 12:00 pm