Women's Cross Country Gearing Up for 2024 Season
Note to media: For more information, contact David Loomis, assistant sports information director, at david.loomis@hastings.edu.
(Hastings, Nebraska) – The Hastings women's cross country team has kicked off practices in hopes of having another strong season. Last season the Broncos were able to grind their way to nationals with multiple injuries to their top runners by taking third at the GPAC meet.
With two of their top runners graduating this past spring, Director of Cross Country Ryan Mahoney will be counting on younger runners to contribute this year.
"It's just going to be the next lady up. By the time we were at conference and nationals, we were missing three of our top five and four of our top eight throughout that season. We return some of those ladies, so if we keep everybody healthy we kind kind of fill back in, but it's going to be something where young runners are going to have to step up and fill those positions that some of those senior ladies that had two or three trips to nationals vacated," Mahoney said.
Senior Shania Santos returns to the team as one of the leaders and she has liked the work that the team has put so far in practice.
"Individually, I was coming off of an injury from last year so my training is kind of skewed. I run two days, off one, run another two, off one. As a team, I think we might have struggled a little bit with our training this summer, but we're usually the comeback team, so everyone is working hard while we're here right now even if they didn't run as much as needed during the summer," Santos said.
Santos noted that while they still hope to perform well at the GPAC meet, they are focused on building the team up to be able to compete at the conference race.
"We lost a lot of our power-runner girls this past season, so I think this year our goal is just to be able to run together, be able to stay with each other and be positive. Third may or may not be our goal this year, so I think right now focusing on just making it to conference is our biggest goal," Santos continued.
The season gets underway on Friday, Sept. 6 at the Augustana Twilight meet. In preparation for the meet, Mahoney has stressed the importance of not having bad days.
"I think it's just going to be learning to be consistent in their training. We talk about you just can't have bad days. You can have a day where maybe you're a little off, but no bad days. (We) got to get something out of every practice session and be consistent in what we do so that when we get to races we can count on everybody," Mahoney said.
The race will take place on Friday, Sept. 6 in Sioux Falls, SD at 7pm.
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