On most teams, you can tell who the best athlete is. You can often tell who the second-best athlete is, too, and so forth. On the Missouri men’s cross-country team, it cannot be done – many of the runners are just that good.
“On the men’s side, it’s going to be really difficult to figure out who’s the top seven or top 10,” coach Marc Burns said. “They’re all interchangeable … for just a lot of guys, anybody can be in that top seven.”
It speaks to the skill and confidence of this year’s runners, who will start the season with the Hawkeye Invitational at the University of Iowa on Friday. Already, preseason rankings have Missouri at No. 5 in the Southeastern Conference, tied with Florida.
But for Burns, a ranking of fifth is an underestimation. The goal “is to outperform the pre-season rankings,” Burns said. “I believe we can be in the top three or four.”
Redshirt junior Sheldon Keence echoed that sentiment, even adding they “can be right up there” with No. 1 Arkansas “if we all [perform well] on the same day.”
Such confidence stems partly from the fact that this year’s team has a huge chunk of returning upperclassmen, including Keence, senior Jordan Cook, junior Marc Dubrick and senior Luca Rosso, who all performed well last season. Such experience gives them high expectations, such as with Keence, the highest performing Mizzou runner at the SEC Championships last year. He expects to finish in the top 15 individually this time around.
Though the upperclassmen make up the core of the team’s competitive edge, many will only run in the later races of the season. It is the underclassmen who will shine in the beginning of the season “to get them experience and opportunity to race at this level and compete,” Burns said.
While many senior and junior athletes simply need to be in good condition, younger athletes need “time to get to the point where they can race at the [collegiate] level,” Burns said. “In our sport, someone’s not going to have a 30-point game out of nowhere.”
Building up the younger athletes will be especially essential this year, since many of the upperclassmen will leave or graduate after this season. Yet, from intense practice this past summer, freshman and sophomore runners are already standing out.
Along with up-and-coming runners freshmen Tyler Gillam and Dylan Quisenberry, “freshman Jacob Schweiss looks really good,” said Burns.”I think he came in really fit, and he’s surprised everybody.”
Redshirt freshman Michael Widmann “made a really big breakthrough in the summer,” said Burns, “so he’s a guy to keep an eye on. He probably will be really up front in our group.”
Whatever the grade level, the men’s cross-country athletes are expecting this season to be their best ever.
“This is my last season here,” Jordan Cook said. “I want this to be the pinnacle of the best I had.”
_Edited by Theo DeRosa | tderosa@themaneater.com_