The BYU men’s cross-country team ranks No. 2 in the country headed into Friday’s NCAA Mountain Regional Championships in Albuquerque. With No. 1 Stanford competing in another region, the Cougars will be the favorites to win.
But not so fast.
“Don’t be surprised if we don’t win the region meet,” says coach Ed Eyestone.
Eyestone plans to hold out three of his top seven runners in the regional meet to rest them for the NCAA championships, which will be held eight days later in Stillwater, Oklahoma. “We want fresh legs for that meet,” he says.
He will run his top four runners, led by All-American Casey Clinger, but sideline his 5-6-7 runners — sophomore twins Creed and Davin Thompson and freshman Aidan Troutner. Eyestone’s regional entries will be Clinger, Brandon Garnica, Christian Allen, Joey Nokes, Kenneth Rooks, Lucas Bons and Luke Grundvig.
“I’ve learned through experience that sometimes the top guys can run a little easier and get a workout out of it (from the race) and still be competitive, but some of the runners behind them have to run harder, relatively speaking, so you rest them for nationals,” he explains. “Especially if they can be in the top 30 or 40 (at NCAAs), where five seconds could be a difference maker.”
In other words, a superior runner such as Clinger, who was eighth in the 2021 NCAA championships, doesn’t have to work as hard as other runners to hold a competitive pace.
This strategy worked for Eyestone in 2019, when he held out some of his top runners in the region meet and finished third, but loaded up at nationals and won the NCAA championships.
Clinger, who has competed in only two meets this fall, will race Friday, but Eyestone says, “I’ll tell him don’t go for the win; this is like a prelim or a heat.”
Eyestone is confident his team can qualify for nationals even without his best lineup, despite facing a field that includes three of the top five teams in the national polls. The top two teams in each of the NCAA’s nine regional meets automatically qualify for the NCAA championships, plus 13 at-large teams for a field of 31 teams. Also, 38 individual runners who are not on those teams advance to nationals.
The men’s 10,000-meter race will begin at 11 a.m. The women’s 6,000-meter race will begin an hour earlier.
The BYU women’s team enters the competition ranked No. 6 in the national polls. The Cougars’ biggest challenges will come from No. 2 New Mexico, No. 4 Northern Arizona, No. 8 Colorado and No. 9 Utah.
The BYU women won the West Coast Conference Championships by a landslide, placing all seven runners in the top 13, led by Aubrey Frentheway, and followed in order by Lexy Halladay-Lowry, McKenna Lee, Carmen Alder, Madi Moffitt, Sadie Sargent and Riley Chamberland.
BYU has been a cross-country powerhouse in recent years. The BYU women have finished second, first and second respectively in the last three NCAA championships, and the men won the 2019 championship. The Cougars also claimed three individual championships in the last two years, with Conner Mantz winning the 2020 and 2021 titles and Whittni Orton winning the 2021 title.
