The Taylor men’ team went down to Tallahassee, Fla., to compete in the Seminole Invite. The Trojans placed eighth as a team while having eight runners place in the top 91 of 317 runners.
Senior Luke Harber finished in 25th place with a time of 25:26.7. Ryan Hanak and Nathan Burns crossed the finish line in 45th and 52nd place with times of 25:55.4 and 26:04.4 respectively.
The team took the chance to run this course because the NAIA National Championship will be held there later this year. The team wanted to get adjusted to the humid conditions and the difficult course.
But despite what seemed like a high achievement for the program, head coach Quinn White walked away disappointed with the outcome.
“Our expectations were to place higher than we did,” he said. “But there was a debacle at the start that had a very negative impact on our team. When you have a bad start against D1 teams, you get buried.”
Trojan runners noticed a false start and waited at the starting line for officials to intervene. When it was clear there would not be an intervention, the Trojans were faced with a later start than they had anticipated.
But despite the obstacle, the Trojans pushed forward. The entire team did their best to stay together throughout the race, which was the game plan Coach White had put in place.
Patiently, they picked off one runner at a time until they found themselves in the middle of the pack. From that point on, the Trojans split up, going into their own worlds of competition.
“We were looking forward to having this experience,” said senior Ryan Hanak. “But we’ve been in a couple of races before where we knew what to do when there are other schools there that are significantly better than us, and how to race in that kind of environment individually.”
In practice, coach White stresses that the team sticks together as much as possible. Having your teammate next to you can help push someone through the hard points of the race.
The team and coaches had plenty of positives to highlight and suggestions for growth. They learned the turns, tangents and hills on a course that would be one of the most important races of the season.
Another takeaway the team took was to learn how to deal with adversity and flip it into an advantage. For this race, it was the start. Another race may be different, but that ability will always be valuable.
Coach White and his staff plan to push the team further in practice. He knows how far they could go and is determined to lead them to reach that point. Every race brings them one step closer to their ultimate goal: the NAIA National Championship.
