Schumacher Addresses Media Monday
November 14, 2006 | Men's Cross Country
Wisconsin men's cross country coach Jerry Schumacher addressed the media Monday afternoon as his top-ranked Badgers prepare for to defend their NCAA Championship on Monday in Terre Haute, Ind. The men's 10,000-meter race begins at 1:15 p.m. ET on the LaVern Gibson Championship course.
The UW has been the No. 1-ranked team all season and enters the national meet as the favorite to win its second consecutive and fifth over NCAA title. The Badgers return five of their top seven finishers from last season and will be led by senior Chris Solinsky, who finished third at the 2005 NCAA Championships.
A complete transcription of the news conference follows below. A video archive of the news conference can be found by clicking on the Audio/Video link to the right.
Jerry, obviously you're a contender coming up. Who do you feel is in the mix with you'
Most likely I would guess Colorado, Arkansas, Iona. A very good team that didn 't make it out of their regionals was UTEP. I thought they were definitely going to be a contender this year, but they didn't actually make it out of the regionals. Oregon and Stanford. I think those are, kind of been the steady teams all season long that we've seen playing up near the front. And there will probably be a surprise team or two that really runs well on the day that will kind of stick their nose up in the front of the pack. But those would be the players, I'd say.
Is this going to be the first race you've run all year with a complete full lineup and who is going to be in that lineup '
We ran our complete lineup at the Big Ten championships. We haven't been 100 percent healthy probably this season and I think we've improved since the Big Ten championships, which we were going to need to in order to be truly a factor and a contender in the meet. I'm excited that we had those three weeks since the Big Ten championship to get better, so that's been good for us. But we ran our complete lineup at the Big Ten meet.
So it's going to be the same seven guys that ran at Big Ten'
We ran nine at Big Ten, so there will be seven of those nine, yeah. So it'll most likely, it'll come from that nine, from those nine guys.
Who's going to be number seven '
I don't know yet. That's a good question. We've had freshmen. We have three freshmen who are running basically six, seven, and eight for us, and they 've done a great job. And from where we started the season with those three guys to where they're finishing up has been night and day.
And every week I think it's someone different who's going to be in there, and they just keep one person runs well one weekend and the next weekend the other guy finds a way to beat that person. And they've been doing that all season long. It's been fun for those freshman guys. I think they've really made some big jumps. So the hard part will be that one of them won't be lining up on the line on Monday, but the good part is that all of them have three more years beyond this year.
Do you know when you expect to make that decision on who lines up'
I'll see how they came off of this weekend first, and then certainly by midweek I'll probably know.
Have you had an all-out team race' I mean, you said you had the full lineup, but have you actually gone out and just the entire team pushed it or would this be that first big test'
Yeah, we ran hard at Big Tens. We ran hard at Big Tens and they did very well. You know, when I looked at the Big Ten results afterwards and kind of looked at them, we pretty much if I was to grade it like a report card, I'd give everybody an A except for probably Chris Solinsky, who definitely had an off day, and there were some other circumstances involved with that.
But other than that, it was pretty much from what I expected from the team, it was a good day for them. So if we can race with that type of intensity and hopefully have improved a little bit, because I think we will have needed to improve since then, I think we'll find ourselves in a good place on Monday. And Chris doesn't have that off day.
We asked Jim about Katrina and Hav. Can you talk about Chris and your seniors'
All three of them will be at the (NCAA) meet for us this year, Chris Solinsky, Tim Nelson and Codie See. They've done a great job with this team this year because it 's a very young team. It is. The rest of the lineup is sophomores and freshmen. They've just done a great job with not only doing, taking care of their end of business on the field, but all the things that go into being off the field and making sure that the team knows that everyone's got to roll.
And whether you're the seventh man, eighth man, ninth man, 10th man, whatever it might be 18th on the depth chart, you have a role in helping advance the program this year. And with all the young bodies in there I think we have eight or nine freshmen that are down at practice every day, that's a big group that can sometimes kind of form their own identity. And I think having a guy like Solinsky around, that's kind of prevented that, which has been good.
So they've done a great job, all three of those guys, and they've done their role and some under less-than-ideal circumstances, but they've done their role and they've done it well. I think that's why we're in the position we're in so far this year again.
Jerry, where does Chris sit in the whole scheme of Wisconsin cross country history'
Probably the toughest spot you can imagine. You're sitting behind, his first three years running behind a three-time Big Ten champion, a two-time national champion in Simon Bairu and, you know, you finish second to him all those years, and that's a tough spot to be in when you're as good as Chris is.
And Chris, like I said, had a little touch of the flu about a week before heading into the Big Ten meet and overextended himself a little bit at the championship race. And it did not go the way he had hoped it would go obviously, which is if you're a good athlete, you're going to find yourself in that position every now and then. And at a big meet that was just a bad break for Chris.
But when you look as a whole for cross country, he's been a part of, you know, two runner-up team championships and a national team championship. He's a three-time All-American. Last year being third and this year, he'll stick his nose in it for the individual win, I'm sure. And you can't really expect much more than that from a college kid. He's done a great job. And we'll be sad to lose him, from all the things that he's brought to the table the last four years.
Does it feel any different being chased as opposed to being the chaser'
No, I don't think so. We've kind of just prepared ourselves to be the best team that we can be on the day. And as Jim was saying, weather, whether it's snow, rain, mud, sun, cold, hot, it doesn't really matter. We're going to we're going to try to manage the day the best that we can under the conditions because every team's got to do that.
And I think the team that does do that best, that's in the mix will probably come out as the winner. And I think we're prepared to do that, so I think we 're prepared to just look at all the variables and hopefully have our best race of the season.
