Syracuse prepares for championship season by avoiding past mistakes

As the Syracuse men and women try to pace themselves during the most important three weeks of the season, the Orange encounter a familiar foe: Buffalo weather.

The past two years at NCAA Northeast Regionals in Buffalo, the Orange have seen below freezing temperatures and have not been able to effectively recover when they head to nationals, senior Aidan Tooker said. Friday’s forecast includes an expected wind chill of 24 when the women’s race begins at 11 a.m.

“You can’t dwell on things you can’t control,” junior Amanda Vestri said. “Every single team out there has to race in it too. So if you go in with the mentality of knowing that everyone has to do it, then there should be no excuses. Just wear gloves and a hat.”

Entering Friday’s race, the men are coming off their sixth ACC championship win in seven years, while the women placed fifth, their worst finish since 2016. The men haven’t lost at the Northeast Regionals since 2012, but they’re wary of overextending their training, a problem they’ve had in the past during the final three races of the year — ACCs, regionals, and NCAA Championships.

“You go into a championship cycle and workouts might get a touch harder but you have a lot more rest in there too,” SU head coach Brien Bell said. “You don’t want them to get stale as well.”

In 2017, the men’s team followed a near identical script to the current group. Behind a mix of seasoned upperclassmen and rising stars, SU notched an early-season victory at the Coast-to-Coast Battle in Beantown and took home first place at the ACC Championships. The 2017 roster would go on to triumph at regionals but fell flat at the NCAA Championships, finishing 13th.

The following year in 2018, the team again started off the season strong but lost their first ACC Championship meet since joining the conference. Redshirt senior Simon Smith said that the team may have overlooked the event in preparation for later races. Despite another victory at regionals later on in the year, the team felt like it had let the program down, Smith said.

The Orange have adopted a new practice schedule to simulate the actual race times and elements. While the team has practiced at around 3 p.m. for the past few years, they have started to run in the morning. The ACC Championships were in warmer-climate Virginia, so they’ve been re-adjusting to the upstate New York weather.

Four years removed from winning the program’s only national championship, Syracuse is led by upperclassmen Joe Dragon, Dominic Hockenbury, Kevin James, and Smith. Behind them, a new wave of ascending runners in Nathan Henderson, Noah Beveridge, and Nathan Lawler round out the top seven. Tooker, who led Syracuse in sixth last year at regionals, will miss the race and is out for the remainder of the season with an undisclosed injury.

The men are ACC champions, but the women had a more disappointing finish to conference play. After a third-place finish in 2018, the women dropped to fifth in 2019. Bell said there were no silver linings to the fifth-place finish.

Last year, the women did not perform well enough at the Northeast Regional to qualify for the national championships. Shannon Malone won the regional and qualified as an individual runner, but she was the sole representative in the second year since 2012 that the team did not qualify.

The Orange are struggling to keep momentum this season after graduating two of their top runners: Malone and her sister, Mary. Four of the six runners at the regional last year are still on the roster, but with Laura Dickinson and Emma Wilson out for the season, Rachel Bonner and Madeleine Davison are the only returning runners from that race. Even with these losses, Vestri has consistently been Syracuse’s top runner.

At the Nuttycombe Invitational in Wisconsin, the women had one of their worst finishes in recent memory. They placed 25th out of 36 teams just one week after a first-place finish at the Coast-to-Coast battle in Beantown.

“Wisconsin was a good wakeup call that we needed and it didn’t define what we had been doing the whole time,” Bonner said.

But SU may have hit the snooze button and failed to recover two weeks later at ACCs. SU’s best hopes to place are Vestri, who finished ninth at ACCs and Bonner, who placed 16th.

Said Bonner: “I have full confidence in the work that we just did over the past month.”