Before this weekend’s Harry Groves Spiked Shoe Invitational at Penn State, Chris Fox laid out his goals for the Syracuse cross country team. The Orange head coach wanted six runners to finish in the top 10 in both the men’s and women’s races that weekend.

Syracuse didn’t quite reach those marks, although it came close. The Syracuse men’s team tallied six top 10 finishers, while the women registered five top 10 runners, to lead the Orange to its second sweep in as many meets this season.

Despite the muddy conditions of the course, SU put on a dominating performance against a weak field. With a couple of tune-up meets under its belt, the Orange looks strong heading into what now becomes the difficult part of its schedule.

Though SU had expected to be ahead of the pack prior to the race, the meet went perhaps better than expected for Fox and the Orange. With six top 10 finishers, the men’s team scored a perfect 15 points, finishing with the top six runners in the race. Junior Dan Busby paced the men with a first-place finish.

‘Obviously, it’s a good thing to get off to a good start,’ Fox said. ‘Both the men and women came up big. The kids always seem to enjoy running at Penn State and they proved it this time.’

The women’s team had an impressive day as well, led by junior Maegan Krifchin’s and Nana Sang-Bender’s second- and third-place finishes, respectively. The women’s team has set a goal of nationals after missing out last season.

Despite the watered-down competition of the first two races, the meet was a way of getting the team ready for future challenges and increasing the experience and confidence of the runners. It was also a way of easing the runners back into competition after the off-season.

‘The later ones are a lot more important,’ said sophomore Katie Hursey. ‘But in order to go to the later ones, we have to be good in the beginning. We’re working towards the later ones, but they’re all pretty important.’

Fox said this was the first time he unveiled his ‘A’ team, though he expects his entire roster to continue getting better as the season progresses. Despite the Orange having a solid veteran roster, several his top runners at the meet were freshmen and are likely to play a major role this season for the Orange.

The race helped get some of those freshmen runners acclimated to college courses, which run 8 km as opposed to the 5-km high school courses.

‘We had a nice pack, and they stayed right in it and beat some great kids, some high school All-Americans from last year,’ Fox said about his freshmen. ‘On the women’s side, Lauren Penney and Heather Stephens (had) big races, and they beat some high school All-Americans too.’

Attention now turns to the Paul Short Invitational at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where the competition gets much tougher. That’s primarily because of the quality and quantity of teams that will be competing. The meet, which Fox referred to as ‘huge,’ will feature roughly 50 big schools, headlined by several nationally ranked teams and all the best schools in the East. All of Syracuse’s traditional rivals will be present as well.

‘The first race we didn’t run all of our best guys,’ said junior Brad Miller. ‘Our next meet is against some much tougher schools, and that’s when it really starts getting competitive. I know Villanova’s going; Wisconsin, Princeton, and Iona are all going. Wisconsin’s probably a top five team in the country … Iona finished third (sic) at nationals last season.’

The Orange has looked good so far this season, but now is where it really starts to count. Though the course at Lehigh is flatter than the one at State College, Pa., it’s important for the Orange to perform well against some of the top competition in the country. And starting with Lehigh, teams will start accumulating points throughout the rest of the season that will help them reach nationals in November.

With the heavy dose of competition heading their way, Fox said he saw Lehigh as an opportunity to prepare his team for the type of talent that will be on display at nationals.

‘Things change completely in this next race,’ Fox said. ‘We’ll probably be running against five teams ranked in the top 15 in the country, so if we can finish somewhere in the middle of that group, we’d be real happy.’

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Published on September 15, 2008 at 12:00 pm