After training all summer in the grueling heat, the Idaho cross country teams are finally ready to race. The Vandals start the season Saturday, Aug. 31, at Spokane, Wash., for the Northwest Classic — a meet the athletes are very familiar with.
Sophomore transfer student Valerie Mitchell, left, and freshman Ally Ginther run on Paradise Creek Path for practice on Thursday. Both women are new this year to the Vandals cross country team. The team will compete in their first race, the Northwest Classic, Saturday in Spokane.
“We’ve ran there a few times,” Idaho coach Wayne Phipps said. “It’s pretty much the same course. It gives us the opportunity for the kids to see how they did relative to the year before.”
Phipps said the meet is a low-key meet to start the season but the Vandals will be going up against some stiff competition. The other NCAA Division 1 teams at the meet include Washington State, Gonzaga and Eastern Washington.
Even with the stiff competition, the main focus for the Vandals will be to shake the rust off and get back into racing form.
“We’ve been training all summer long but racing is completely different,” Phipps said. “It takes a couple races under your belt to get a feel for it again. That’s really the main purpose of having this meet.”
Heading into the season, the Idaho women’s cross country team is the early favorite to win the WAC for the fourth straight season. Seniors Hannah Kiser, Emily Paradis and Alycia Butterworth haven’t gone a season without winning the WAC title since their freshman year in 2010. Kiser was also the individual WAC Champion in 2012.
“On the women’s side, we’ve won the last three years in a row,” Phipps said. “We joked around about it a little bit after their freshman year that they were going to try to win all four years. Now here we are three years later and they are in a position where they can have an opportunity to win four straight years.”
While the women’s side is full of veterans, the men’s side does not have any players left who were on the team three years ago. The depleted men’s team lists only four athletes on its 2013 roster — juniors Colton Hastings and Cayle Turpen and sophomores Santos Vargas and Tyler Jaszkowiak. A team needs five runners in order to score as a team in meets. The top returner is Vargas who finished 22nd at the 2012 WAC Championships.
“We’ve had an amazing recruiting class on the (men’s) side,” Phipps said. “Definitely a very talented team but a very young team. We’ll have to take a very careful approach to the training this season.”
The season starts out slow for the cross country teams but it will gain speed as the Vandals get further into the season.
“This is a perfect meet for the first meet of the year.” Phipps said “We’ll come off a really hard block of training but it’s just important to get up there and race. Not worry too much about the outcome on this first one.”
Stephan Wiebe can be reached at [email protected]