I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
How does a three-peat sound, @Wolfpack_TFXC? 🐺 #NCAAXC pic.twitter.com/Ks8Hx1OXrm
— FloTrack (@FloTrack) November 18, 2023
GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
Nice hardware @Wolfpack_TFXC 🏆#GoPack | #StrengthInThePack pic.twitter.com/VUSJS3tHFl
— NC State Athletics (@PackAthletics) November 18, 2023
So is that confirmed behind the scenes? I saw the team instagram account started following Fiona Smith at some point this season.Nairo said:
D3 national champion is transferring in as well.GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
jadawson said:So is that confirmed behind the scenes? I saw the team instagram account started following Fiona Smith at some point this season.Nairo said:
D3 national champion is transferring in as well.GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
And Angelina Napoleon should help out next year as well.GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
Awesome news. Should be really competitive again next year.Nairo said:
Yes.jadawson said:So is that confirmed behind the scenes? I saw the team instagram account started following Fiona Smith at some point this season.Nairo said:
D3 national champion is transferring in as well.GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
🚨Attention Wolfpack Nation🚨
— Pack Track & Field and Cross Country (@Wolfpack_TFXC) November 18, 2023
Come help us celebrate the THREE-PEAT tonight in Raleigh‼️
The team bus will be arriving at the Belltower at 6:45 p.m. for a National Championship celebration🏆🏆🏆
Be early, be loud, and GO PACK🐺
Quote:
We don't measure the character of an athlete on their best day, but on their toughest. Today, @katelyntuohy proved herself a true leader of the Wolfpack.
Despite coming down with a sickness, she still led @wolfpack_tf_xc with a fifth place finish as they captured their third consecutive national title by one point.
They must have been good thoughts. LOLT-Buck said:
Well stated Drummer Boy.
I came on here to post my thoughts, but you had already done it.
Error in the GoPack article. This is the third All-American honor for Tyynismaa in cross country. She finished 3rd in the March 2021 race in Stillwater, and 9th at the Novemeber 2022 race in Stillwater.Wolfer79 said:
This marks the fourth cross country All-American honor for Tuohy, the third for Bush and the second (first at NC State) for Tyynismaa.
Quote:
The post should be retitled "The Miracle in Charlottesville." There is no way in hell we should have won this - I did not think we were going to win, and I didn't know until I got on the shuttle bus to the course this morning there was anything wrong with Chmiel. When I saw that, I told myself it would be good if they just finished in the top 4 and got on the podium.
Annual cross country scoring primer, which is particularly important today:
- your score is the sum of the places of your first five runners (at NCAA's there are individual runners who don't count, so the scoring places other than Tuohy are lower than the actual places) with the lowest score winning. Sixth and seventh runners don't count but can displace other teams' scorers, though that did not come into play with NC State and NAU today.
- it doesn't take much knowledge to realize how much of a blow losing someone like Chmiel - who was 3rd, 6th, and 9th the last three years - is to your score. This is not a "Dusan is out, so DJ is going to have to take on more of a load" situation. Your best people are already doing all they can. You replace #2 with #6, not by having the others in the top 5 do more. And we were replacing basically the best #2 in NCAA women's cross country history.
- the tiebreaker is which team won more of the head-to-head battles between runners in the same position on the team, and NAU beat State there, so they had to win outright.
Beyond that - State's #2 today, Amaris Tyynismaa, transferred in January after a pair of top 10 NCAA finishes at Alabama. She had an injury that had limited her training in the summer and had never finished a cross country meet at NC State. She didn't race until late October and dropped out of both the ACC and regional meets. #3 Samantha Bush has been a big-time performer in the prior championships, but missed the spring and part of the summer with an injury and didn't look close to ready six weeks ago. The next three people after that were freshmen (two redshirts, but redshirts because they weren't close to making the lineup) and none of them Tuohy/Chmiel-like recruits. Ironically they did have a recruit that I thought could be an all-American right of the box, but she hasn't been close to making the lineup this fall and redshirted.
There were split times and scores at each kilometer, and State was pretty far back in fifth at 1k (pretty meaningless since the pack is so bunched), close in fourth at 2k, and slightly ahead of NAU in first at every remaining split. I was stunned when I saw it at 3k. It just seemed impossible given what they were dealing with, and I didn't even know until after the race that Tuohy was sick. She fell as far back as 11th at 4k when the main front group broke up, was in a 5th-9th block when she passed me with 400 meters to go, and beat all of those people by at least three seconds. Sam Bush as usual passed 14 people in the last kilometer. Freshman Leah Stephens was on absolute fumes, both in this race and the season (essentially trading places with Bush in both the last km and the last month), but held on just well enough - there were three women whose time was 20:08.2, and she was the first of them. Lose a couple thousandths of a second, and Statelosesgets second.
NAU should have scored 80-100 in this meet based on how they ran all season. They didn't today, and the State women did an absolutely incredible job of putting themselves in position to capitalize on something they could not have known was going to happen.
Someone who was there told me that talking to the team last night, Geiger said "There's no way one person can replace Kelsey, but working together, everyone can do a part to make it up." That turned out to be exactly what happened. I haven't felt like this at a cross country meet since 1991. I spent five minutes after the race walking around shaking, hoping that there was not one point swing that turned it into a tie we lost. (That happened last year to the Oklahoma State men on their home course.)
A final thing, that I was talking to other XC lifers about before the meet. It's awesome to have other NC State fans caring about cross country. But it also feels like people who had very little idea about what was happening before the last three years don't grasp how hard this is, and how small the margins are. Great runners - Tuohy-level great - bomb at NCAA's on a regular basis and finish in triple-digit places (I listed 8 examples off the top of my head to someone after the race, all Olympians or collegiate or American record holders). To have your awful day be FIFTH is incredible. State was legit the best team in the country in '21 and '22, and yet in both cases ran great at NCAA's and was one off day out of five from not winning. They were not the best team this season, and still won. To have that whole sequence come together three years in a row in unbelievable. It was not preordained even as good as we were. Savor it. We might not see it again from an NC State team in our lifetimes, and that doesn't even require a Wolfpack fan's scars to say.
thank youtoddl said:
My pessimism/skepticism coming into this race was based around the Nuttycombe and the Mountain regional results.
At Nuttycombe, NAU smoked us. They put 6 in front of our 4, and 7 in front of our 5. We were racing without Bush and Tyynismaa but with Chmiel. If we inserted Bush and Tyynismaa at peak form, we probably would have won Nuttycombe. But with no evidence that Bush and Tyynismaa were going to be at peak form, you had to tip the scales to NAU.
At Mountain Regional, NAU rested 3 of their top 5 and once again smoked 2nd place, #3 ranked BYU. If you can beat the pants off the #3 team in the country without 3 of your top 5, then what chance do the rest of us have? They were getting to legendary status in my head.
With both teams healthy, it was going to be a coin-flip at best. Then with Chmiel out, combined with those two earlier data points, the coin-flip turned into an extreme underdog.
But that's why we don't give out trophies based off paper. Still gotta perform on the day. BYU finished 14th at NCAAs. Just a bad day, or not as good as we thought? Maybe NAU beating them at regionals wasn't as impressive as I thought it was. And NAU certainly didn't run a flawless race, but that's life. Upsets happen. That's why we run the race. Feels good to be on the winning end.
GuerrillaPack said:I can't remember the details, but they decided to redshirt Abby Loveys for cross country this season. I believe the plan is for her to run cross country in the fall of 2024. She's someone who could potentially be All-American in cross country and finish round 30-40 at nationals. So she could be a key piece for next year. And, yes, Rauber was injured all this season.DrummerboyWolf said:
I was looking back through last year's thread. Is there any reason Abby Loveys did not race? Rauber was injured I believe all year. We are so deep and despite not having nearly a full roster ready to go we were still able to pull off the 3-peat.
Looking ahead to next year, we have a team that should be top 10 and in the mix to compete for the title again -- with Stephens, Hartman, Loveys, Gapes, Rauber, and true freshman Bethany Michalak (who could contribute immediately like Stephens did this year).
GuerrillaPack said:
Adding the FloTrack post-race interview with Tyynismaa since the Let's Run video cut off the last minute of the interview. One of the interesting things she says in this interview is that after DNF'ing at ACCs and Regionals, she "didn't even know if she would run at Nationals". But then when they knew Kelsey would be out, she had a new resolve to step up and "come through for the team".
GuerrillaPack said:
Excellent info jadawson. Just one thing....you said Henes became the the head coach of women's cross country in 2016. The GoPack bio of Coach Henes says she became the head coach of women's cross country in 2006. Was yours a typo?
jadawson said:
Still buzzing from yesterday. Wall of text incoming but i've been doing some "end of an era" reflecting on this team. Even though i definitely expect the team to remain competitive in future years, i've taking a moment and have been thinking about how special the class of 2019 has been and how it has changed the trajectory of this program. If anyone hasn't figured it out by now i'm a big XC/Track fan. Love basketball and football as well, but running holds a special place for me and i really enjoy following the sport at HS, College and Pro level. so my alma mater NC State being good is something i really take pride in.
To go back in time, Laurie Henes was made head coach of women's XC in 2016. The team was solid, but not the behemoth we know today at that point, and hadn't really been that top tier team since the run in the 1980's. Prior to Coach Henes getting the reins, the Women had finished 23rd in 2011 and then missed nationals in 2012 and 2013 before finishing 16th in 2014 and a really strong 5th in 2015. A couple of recruiting victories like the Frazier sisters and some strong development of runners like Erika Kemp, Rachel Koon and Megan Moye had the team the best it had been in well over a decade.
In 2016, now under Coach Henes, the team built upon that prior season and finished 4th, back on the podium for the first time since 2001 (and 1988 was the last time before that). Coach Henes had developed multiple runners into all-americans in Erika Kemp and Rachel Koon, the first time the team had multiple all americans in one year since 2006. They were able to maintain that strong level of performance, but not necessarily build upon it as they finished 8th and 13th.
Then the class of 2019 comes in and things immediately change. The headliner of the class was of course Kelsey Chmiel. High School superstar. Would have won countless state and national titles if it wasn't for Katelyn Tuohy. One of the most coveted recruits in the country and could have gone anywhere but she knew she wanted to be a Veterinarian and there probably isn't a better combo of Vet Science and Running in the country than NC State. The other jewel of the class turned out to be Samantha Bush, who was definitely a solid recruit, but was mostly an afterthought in a class that included Chmiel.
The results were immediate. NC State shot right back up from 13th to finish 5th in XC in 2019, followed by 2nd in 2020 and 1st 3 times in a row from 2021-2023. All Chmiel and Bush have done is combine for 7 all-american finishes in those years, and the cool part about that is that both of them were an all-american every single time the lined up at XC nationals. Bush was not in the squad in 2019 or 2020 and Chmiel obviously didn't race in 2023. 7 for 7 is unreal. This isn't even mentioning their track credentials where both are again multiple time all-americans and have their names all over our all-time lists.
The imprint they leave is also more than the team finishes for the years they have been here. Would Katelyn Tuohy have come to NC State if Kelsey Chmiel wasn't here? It's certainly possible, but she's mentioned that she liked the fact that someone she was friends with was already on the team. Would these awesome transfers we've gotten over the past 4 years have wanted to come to NC State if Chmiel and Bush hadn't helped start the transformation of what people outside the program thought of NC State? Hannah Steelman was an all-american in XC already at another school and chose to transfer to NC state. Allie Hays was a track all-american at another school and chose to transfer to NC State. Same with Amaris Tyynismaa. Do all these great runners come in if we are still a program with inconsistent finishing sometimes back in the mid-teens? Hard to say. We currently have a crazy pipeline recruiting women's distance runners from NY and that started in earnest with Chmiel. Katelyn Tuohy, Claire Walters, Jenna Schulz, Brooke Rauber, Angelina Napoleon, Kate Putman all being national-level recruits from that state and choosing NC State since 2020.
The program is going to keep going and continue being great due to Coach Henes and the team culture here. I'm certainly not writing us off for competing again next year depending on how the portal shakes out. And this post certainly isn't trying to downplay the effect of others towards this current state of the program, like Tuohy, Elly Henes and Coach Henes herself. But knowing it's likely the last time in an NC state XC singlet for many of the top runners on this team right now makes me want to take a step back and reflect on how awesome the past 5 years have been for NC state XC and how it has changed how i view the future possibilities drastically..
