As we enter the 2016 cross country season, one New York team finds itself on the precipice of the unbelievable. One team will be contesting for their tenth Nike Cross Nationals Title. Created in 2004, the annual event brings together the best teams in the nation, culminating their season with one final race. Since 2006, Fayetteville-Manlius has won all but one of these competitions, coming 12-points shy in 2013. Their reign includes 9 National Titles for the girls, and 1 National Title for the boys, peppered with several top 4 finishes as well. The perennial question is always, "How do they do it?"
Each year, Bill Meylan of TullyRunners puts out his State and National Previews. Over time, he began to include this singular thread to every mention of Manlius in the Pre-Season, "With stiff competition
from Saratoga, FM will need to
reload at least one new effective scorer in order to repeat as
the top team in NY ... FM has developed at least one new
"high-level" performer every year since they began their "national"
winning in 2006 ... So I give FM the benefit-of-the-doubt and
expect it will happen again this year
."
This small statement, only relevant because of the nature of uncertainty in preseason projections, is one major key to the continued success of the upstate New York public high school. The ability to create "New Blood" is the glue that has held the program, among many other different contributing factors. Meylan describes the term below.
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In Terms of Cross Country, What is New Blood??
The term "new blood" has descriptive appeal ... I use the term to designate any runner that did not compete for a team's main varsity team the prior year. When looking at the title of this article ("Improving a Cross Country Team Quickly..."), initial thoughts go straight to an occurrence of a top runner transferring from one school to a different school ... Clearly, that is a major possibility ... However, there are other ways a team can get "new blood" ... Here are some possibilities:
(1) Transfer from one school to another school
(2) Transfer from another sport to cross country within the same school
(3) A runner from another country (Who could I
possibly be thinking about?
)
(4) Incoming 7th Graders that jump straight to the Varsity team
(5) Junior Varsity runners moving up to the main Varsity level
(6) Junior High runners moving up to the main Varsity level
I can think of examples of all the above possibilities that made major improvements in various teams ... Incoming junior high runners and improved junior varsity runners have a positive impact on many teams every year, so the effect of "new blood" is widespread ... In addition, somebody must replace the graduating seniors, and sometimes the "new blood" does it very well indeed.
As a person who like to predict the outcome of races (or
the general quality of a team), "new blood" can be something of an enigma ...
Sometimes it's effect is easy to see ahead-of-time ... Sometimes there's no way
of knowing until after it happens ... "New Blood"
produces precarious pre-season prognostication
.
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