University of Minnesota Athletics
Hopkins Previews Louisville, UW-Eau Claire
10/1/2015 12:00:00 AM | Women's Cross Country
MINNEAPOLIS — The No. 23 Golden Gophers will compete at two meets this week as the team heads to the UW-Eau Claire Blugold Invitational on Friday and the Greater Louisville Classic on Saturday.
GopherSports.com caught up with head coach Sarah Hopkins as the team prepares for another tough week of racing following the always-challenging Roy Griak Invitational last weekend.
Gopher Sports: What's it like heading out on the first road trip of the season?
Sarah Hopkins: It's exciting to get on the road! We've been on our home course three times. I think there are a lot of good elements of getting away from home. One, just bringing that group together. It's the first time our top group has traveled together, and there are different bodies in there than have traveled before, so it's great experience for some of our young kids. It's a good reminder for the older kids of how to be away from home and what they need to take care of, being in a hotel, not waking up in your own bed, things like that are just a little different. I think that's good practice for everybody.
It's also nice to just get away from our course and run on a different course. Obviously it can get a little stale running the same course every week, and it's nice to change things up and have a different terrain and different competition.
It's going to be a really great weekend, and Louisville is a fun town. We'll race early in the day Saturday and then do some touristy stuff and just have some fun. We did that at BYU last year, too. We use some of these early season meets to be there early in the weekend on a business trip, and then be able to do some fun things and bond as a team, too.
GS: How do you feel about the team's progress so far this season?
SH: The really positive thing about running at home for the month of September is that we don't really have to make red-shirting decisions yet because everyone can just race head-to-head. My theory has always been from the red-shirting perspective, if somebody can be in the top nine as a freshman, we go. They're going to make the Big Ten team more than likely and maybe be an alternate at regionals, or even make the regional team, depending on how things go. That's huge experience. As long as they're healthy and running well, we go.
Emily Betz was our number six runner at both Oz and Griak. She'll travel to Louisville with that top group this weekend. It's great to get her to learn and be on the road with Liz Berkholtz, Kaila Urick, and some of these guys that are graduating so she can learn from them and watch them in their process and how they do things. I think that's a really big learning experience, and then she can even bring that back to the other freshmen. It's nice to have somebody that's getting that experience and maybe coming back to her freshmen group and helping them progress as well. We're excited to see what she can do and like I said, she's done a heck of a job in the month of September, so it'll be fun to see getting her on the road and seeing how good we can be.
GS: How significant is the role of the veteran runners this weekend?
SH: At the Oz, we had some freshmen that were up in that top group, which was great, but at Griak, you kind of saw the savvy vets up where they were supposed to be. Coming off back-to-back weekends, that's going to be advantageous for the veterans. Obviously they've done it before; they've been in the grind before. Having people who've done that really helps when you're trying to put them in a situation like this, when you're going to have two pretty intense weeks back-to-back. They've done it before; they know how to play the game. I'm not really worried. It's nice to have a set veteran group to be able to do things like that.
I don't doubt that some of the freshmen can still put their noses in their and mix it up a little bit, but it's nice to not have to rely on people that have never been there before. You can have those guys be your happy bonus, and have your kids that have been there over and over again more consistent, which is good for us as a team. It's good for the freshmen too, to know that we can count on these guys and that there's not as much pressure on them to carry the load at this point.
GS: What are you hoping to see out of the group racing at the Blugold Invitational?
SH: It's fun for them to get away and come together as a group, too. Go out to dinner Friday night after the meet off campus, be on a bus trip, and get away for a little bit as a group versus just showing up at the course from your house and going home after the meet. Nick Larson is going to go with that group, our volunteer assistant coach, so they'll have a full-time coach there, which will be nice too, to have someone directing traffic and helping them there, being able to watch the meet and give them feedback. We can take a few more than 12 people to the Wisconsin adidas Invitational, so at Eau Claire, we're also looking at people competing for those spots at the Wisconsin meet. I know there's going to be some pretty good competition there to earn those three, four, five spots. It adds a little element of intrigue to that race. ###
