Kirubel Erassa, who fell at the start of the NCAA championship race and finished 83rd, says the race "still feels like a nightmare."
The Oklahoma State University Cowboys have won three of the last five NCAA titles in men’s cross country. Unlike other storied programs, such as Colorado, Stanford and Wisconsin—many of which have taken more than a decade to amass their wins—the Cowboys’ ride at the top is only a recent phenomenon.
What’s behind their meteoric rise?
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last year, went out near the back and never moved up, struggling home in 212
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The Cowboys reflect on the 2013 cross country season
Part V: Losing Third Place
“There’s this concept that painful experiences are remembered much more by the last 10 percent than by the first 90,” Dave Smith says. The Oklahoma State cross country coach (pictured at right), who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the molecular basis of learning and memory formation, is mulling over this tidbit as he thinks back over the 2013 season. Two weeks prior, the Cowboys finished a disappointing third at the NCAA championship, failing to defend their 2013 title and preseason No. 1. Speaking from his office in Stillwater, Okla., Smith, who sounds croaky from a cold he picked up while on vacation in Hawaii, admits he’s finding it hard to be positive. “Thirty minutes,” he says, referring to the length of the NCAA’s final race, “decides it all.” He pauses, sniffling on the other line.
On Nov. 23, in Terre Haute, Ind., the Cowboys lined up for the NCAA title meet ranked No. 2, behind Northern Arizona University and in front of the University of Colorado, then ranked No. 3. The morning was cold and blustery. The wind chill was 19 by the noon start time. A combination of rain and plummeting overnight temperatures in the days before had left the LaVern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course, host of 10 of the last 12 NCAA meets, a minefield of mud puddles and frozen grass. The start line had to be moved 100 meters up to avoid a swale of water. Like in 2004 and 2006, when there was similarly poor footing, the times would end up almost a minute slower than usual. And as Smith predicted, Mountain Region teams—Colorado, NAU, BYU— excelled in the grueling conditions, outrunning better track-credentialed squads like OSU and Oregon. Colorado eventually triumphed in the kind of wily, out-of-nowhere-in-the-last-2K victory that is now their calling card, with NAU a close second. OSU finished third, more than 80 points off the win.
“I was still trying to convince myself,” Smith says, “all the way up to race time, that we were the best team.” Despite his gnawing anxiety, Smith knew that given the perfect day, his men could muster a win. “But it’s a game of inches,” he says, “and anything can set it off.” That anything, on Nov. 23, started right as the gun sounded. Kirubel Erassa, OSU’s year-long No. 1, fell in the muck and never really got back in the hunt. He slogged on to an 83rd-place finish, well back from the top 15 his coaches were counting on. He wasn’t the only top-notch talent to struggle. All American Joseph Manilafasha, 24th last year, went out near the back and never moved up, struggling home in 212th, Published: Dec 18, 2013 6:34 AM ESTnd. “We had an average day, across the board,” assistant coach Bobby Lockhart says. Even multitime All American Tom Farrell, with his 13:15 5K PR, by far the fastest in the field, managed only 16th place. The race didn’t favor the fast.
Now, several weeks later, the Cowboys are stuck in an echo chamber of disappointment. Farrell, who scored on two title teams at OSU, is using the day as a reminder of how hard it is to win a national championship. “By training hard, you can eliminate how much luck you need,” he says, speaking from his home in Carlisle, England, on the eve of his 12th place finish at the European Cross Country Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, “But on that day, you still need five guys to run their best.” Asked if he was frustrated that the conditions played such a large role in their defeat, Farrell got stern and shrugged off the implication: “Could we call ourselves a cross country powerhouse if we could only win when it’s flat and firm?”
The fact is, OSU’s three titles have all come on dry days, on flat and firm courses. Smith sees this and doesn’t want his team to be a one-trick pony. “We need to get aerobically stronger,” he says, thinking about how OSU can compete with those altitude-trained teams like Colorado, NAU and BYU, which seem so coolheaded in punishing conditions. “I’m rethinking how we do things a little bit,” Smith says. The thought lingers, and his typically sly patter turns hesitant and searching. He talks about doing more threshold running, but then waves it off, thinking of the increased injury potential. For now, beating Colorado on a muddy day sounds like exploring unlit caves.
Even if Smith is already beginning to scheme for next year, most of his returning runners (OSU loses Farrell, Manilafasha and Shadrack Kipchirchir, who was 31st at nationals) aren’t quite ready to move on just yet. For Erassa, the frustration of Terre Haute won’t pass until he races there again. “It still feels like a nightmare,” he says on the eve of his marketing research final, “falling down, not competing at the front, losing.” Brian Gohlke, who wound up OSU’s fifth scorer in 91st, wishes he could have the day back. “I’m pissed off; I let the weather and course affect me,” he says via phone, taking a break from studying for his macroeconomics exam. “I overthought everything.”
It’s convenient to suggest that OSU was the superior team and simply fell victim to bad weather, but that overlooks issues that affected the Cowboys all year. Moskowitz suffered a hip labral tear in the early summer, and during the season he was hampered by post-surgical pain and forced to take three weeks off in October. “Losing him was a huge blow,” Lockhart says. Manilafasha was not at his best, either, as personal issues troubled his performance all year.
As with almost all cases of athletic cave-ins, the heaviest contributing factor is a little more nebulous. “We weren’t as focused as we needed to be,” Smith says. Asked to elaborate, he quickly rattles off a list of what he calls “the little things”: Going to bed at 9, not partying, eating right, doing drills, lifting weights. That’s what Smith calls “being on board.” And it can’t just be the top seven. It has to be all 20 guys, or it dilutes the focus of the top seven. The biggest of those little things, for Smith, is keeping your mental edge. “You can’t think you’re as good as everyone says you are.”
That kind of underdog mentality is partly what allowed OSU to creep up the NCAA ranks in the last 10 years almost unnoticed. When he talks about recruiting his first few classes, Smith is fond of reciting his blue-collar pitch: “We had no track, no locker room, no mall in town, no palm trees, no beach, no mountains. Kids came here for a pair of shoes and a chance to win. They came here because they thought it was the best place for their running.” Dick Weis, head coach at OSU from 1983 until Smith took over in 2006, echoes Stillwater’s unglamorous chic: “It takes a certain runner to come here.”
Some of that changed in 2008. Smith nabbed high-profile recruits Colby Lowe and German Fernandez, effectively putting OSU on the distance running map overnight. “We got lucky,” he admits. With the addition of those media lodestones and Ryan Vail’s leadership, OSU began to contend, in races and recruiting, with the likes of Wisconsin, Stanford and Oregon. In concert, OSU’s athletic department, and its largest benefactor, T. Boone Pickens, were investing heavily in no longer being the “other school” in Oklahoma. “We’ve evolved,” says Lockhart. “We expect to win, because that’s the new standard at OSU.” Cowboy football and basketball are now both consistently top-20 teams, with facilities to rival any in the country. And with a new $10 million track, it’s clear Smith has the full financial support of the athletic department. Asked how OSU went from an also-qualified to a perennial powerhouse in a little under a decade, Smith doesn’t equivocate. “We invested in it,” he says, “financially.”
With wins in 2009, 2010 and 2012, the beautification of Stillwater was nearly complete. “Now we’ve got the facilities, the championships—we’re a shinier name.” Paradoxically, Smith says being shinier means it’s a little harder to separate out the kids who want to win from the kids who want to do what it takes to win. “You gotta get the right people,” he says, “and it’s hard to figure that out.” For Smith and Lockhart, the recruiting coordinator, that begins at home in Oklahoma. “You start close to campus,” Smith says, “looking for the right guys, but it’s hard; not everyone wants to go to OSU, so we expand out from there.” In looking for the right people, Smith’s locker room has quickly harmonized into a melody of languages and accents. He has male and female athletes from Kenya, England, Norway, Lithuania and elsewhere.
Curiously, this inevitability of recruiting has incited widespread criticism against Smith. During the run up to the national championship, for example, Flotrack asked him about how he responded to objections that his team was “just a bunch of foreigners.” He felt the fomenting jab a little specious, in the context of OSU and track being global institutions, and also unfounded. After all, only two of his current male athletes—Kipchirchir and Farrell—are not Americans. And more to the point: “If the sport’s evolving and if international kids are more and more interested in coming to the U.S., and if they want to be part of a team, they fit your system, they fit what you do, they’re good teammates, you’re going to tell me you’re not going to take that guy because he was born on the wrong side of a line? I don’t understand that mentality,” Smith says.
Unfortunately, that mentality has percolated through the NCAA, where today, bias against foreign-born athletes is almost institutionalized. For example, until as late as 2008, non-American athletes had to be top 30 overall to earn their All-American certificate, whereas Americans only had to be in the top 30 of Americans. This kind of handicapping certainly hasn’t done the U.S. any favors competing at the post-collegiate level. It also takes the phrase “All-American” a little too literally, tainting the national meet with nationalism. The media’s tracking of both collegiate and American collegiate records similarly continues to divide collegiate sportsmanship into an “us versus them” mentality. A mentality that very often works to exclude student-athletes of East African descent.
Those concerns are far from Smith’s mind this December, though. He’s trying to wrap his head around competing with Colorado and NAU next fall. Colorado, after all, returns all seven (and adds injured All-American Jake Hurysz), and NAU returns six. Smith doesn’t want this year’s third place to turn into next year’s top 10
“This will be the first time in awhile,” Smith says with a deep breath, “that we won’t have an All-American coming back. We have to face that.” They also have to face the loss of Farrell’s leadership for the track season, as the senior has elected to forgo his remaining outdoor eligibility and turn professional, in order to focus on the Commonwealth Games this August.
“The Tom Farrells, Ryan Vails,” Smith says, “those guys win championships. They’re not afraid to confront people, create a culture. But people have to follow them; they can’t be a lone wolf.” The question now, with the loss of Farrell, is who will step up to lead the pack.
Smith welcomes that little bit of uncertainty. In fact, his voice clears and quickens as he switches to a sunnier metaphor to explain: “Sometimes you prune from the top,” he says. “You cut off the top branches and finally those lower branches get some light and really begin to grow.” But then the scientist in Smith interjects, as he points out they’ll be going in next year with the fewest guys that have run at a national championship since 2009.
Smith’s cerebral firestorm never allows him to linger on any data point for too long. He confesses his sinus infection and disappointment from that last 10 percent of the season have gotten the best of him, but that, really, his attitude is on the uptick. “You know, when I lost Ryan Vail, I thought, ‘How are we ever going to replace that guy?’ Some of the guys always thought, ‘Ryan will do it, Ryan will do it, Ryan will do it.’” He clears his voice. “Then they thought, ‘Oh shoot, I have to do it.’ And they did. They won. Same with when German and Colby left. The next group of guys stepped up.”
Smith wants OSU “to be the most dominant program in the NCAA,” but also knows there’s a reason why only a handful of active coaches have a title. “Just because you’ve got the guys, the training, the history, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” adds Lockhart. “These are 18-, 19-, 20-year-old guys—anything can happen. Winning is just one of those things.”
Many distant roads must converge for a team to arrive home with a national championship. At OSU, that convergence can no longer be left to chance. It can no longer remain merely an ambition, an auspicious end to a lucky season, a hope. Winning is now the expectation. Or as Farrell put it: “In 2007, we won third place. This year, we lost it.”
Noah Gallagher Shannon was a multitime Colorado state champion in cross country and track and ran at the University of Wisconsin. Gallagher Shannon’s work has appeared in Slate and New York Times Magazine, among others. He lives in New Mexico.
