Syracuse cross-country hopes depth continues to thrive at NCAA championships

Syracuse cross-country head coach Chris Fox felt great as he surveyed his team.

The Orange held out senior Max Straneva and freshman Justyn Knight— who finished second and third for SU in the Atlantic Coast Conference championships, respectively — and even though Fox didn’t expect to win the NCAA Northeast Regional on Friday in the Bronx, New York, Syracuse did anyway.

The win is, Fox believes, a testament to the depth his men’s team possesses.

“It was great,” he said. “They ran smart, they ran together and they ran not even close to 100 percent.”

The SU men rested two of its top three runners to conserve their energy for the biggest race of the year this Saturday. Both the Orange men’s and women’s teams will race at the NCAA Division I championships at the LaVern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course in Terre Haute, Indiana. The second-ranked Orange men’s team believes depth is the key to a great performance, and it certainly has plenty of it.

In the Northeast Regional, Syracuse’s top four runners finished within three seconds of each other. Its fifth runner finished just more than five seconds behind the pack.

The Orange fields a roster including ACC individual champion and senior Martin Hehir, as well as juniors Dan Lennon, Joel Hubbard and MJ Erb and sophomore Colin Bennie. Knight and Straneva fill out the seven-man team.

“Our seventh man feels like he can run with anyone else’s third man,” Fox said. “Every one of those guys ran like they owned the place (in the ACC championships), like they didn’t care.”

The Orange faces its toughest competition yet against another deep team in top-ranked Colorado, but also in top-heavy teams like No. 3 Oregon and No. 4 Oklahoma State.

In a clash of ideologies, Oregon has what Fox says is a one-two punch of runners that no else has. Yet the Ducks sacrifice depth as their fourth through seventh runners are less successful.

The strength of having a deep team is that it takes pressure off the fourth and fifth runners because it lets them just run, allowing for a bad day when the sixth and seventh runners can have a great day.

“For teams that just have the front firepower, they really get stuck relying on their fourth or fifth guy,” Hehir said. “If that backfires, there’s no back-up plan.”

Syracuse’s depth also helps during a race because oftentimes the men will be so close that they can talk, strategize and monitor each other.

Knight said that sometimes the races even seem like just a tough workout practice because he’s in a pack running with his SU teammates, with whom he’s comfortable and accustomed to.

The magnitude of the NCAAs can cause such bad nerves that it compels runners to head out too fast and waste energy too early, but Syracuse has a response to that as well.

“Sometimes some people get excited and try to push too early,” Knight said. “Our group will say, ‘Slow down. Don’t worry. It’s a part of the plan.’”

The Orange’s plan will not deviate from the one they’ve used so far this season.

SU will have to go out a little bit quicker than usual because the field of 315 runners is the largest the Orange has seen this season. SU wants to be among the top 40 runners at the start of the race, Hehir said. Then they’ll “sit on” — or wait behind — the top teams until the final two or three kilometers, which is when most of the runners make their move.

The fact that the No. 2 Orange enters the NCAAs as a top team with the ability to drop other teams is new territory for the SU men, Fox said.

But SU’s confident with the seven it’ll bring.

Said Hehir: “We’re ready to go out hard and see what happens.”