By Adam Gibson | Copy Editor
The Baylor men’s and women’s cross country teams are set and ready to start the 2017-2018 season. The team enters the season with high hopes, with the men ranked at No. 5 and the women No. 4 in the South Central regional rankings.
The season begins today with Baylor hosting the Bear Twilight Invitational. Baylor assistant cross country coach Jon Capron is excited to host the invitational and is looking forward to having the athletes start their season in Waco.
“It’s nice because I get to control the variables,” Capron said. “Mostly it’s a chance for all of my athletes to get a chance to compete and get some work done.”
Sophomore standout runner Devin Meyrer will not be running due to an injury that occurred last season. Instead, he will sit out and start his season at the second meet, the Ken Garland Invitational on Sept. 16. Meyrer finished his freshman season by earning All-Region honors with a 17th place finish at the NCAA South Central Regional meet in Fayetteville, Ark., and finished fourth at the Bear Twilight Invitational in four-mile time.
“The week of the first meet we opened up at TCU. I got a ton of heel pain and I just tried to run on it a few more days and I said ‘no this isn’t right,’ so I got an MRI and turns out I had a stress reaction,” Meyrer said.
The women’s cross country team is looking to start off the season on the right foot as well. With the majority of the team being underclassmen, the young squad is looking to prove their dominance as a team. Sophomore Gabby Satterlee is focused on her own personal goals as well as the team’s goals for the upcoming season.
“I could see, especially over this past summer, just how much stronger I am,” Satterlee said. “With knowing that, I really want my team to do really well this year and I want to be a big part in helping that…just race faster than I did last year.”
The Lady Bears did not finish where they would have liked last year at No. 27 overall. Now they are looking to this season and putting the past behind them, only striving to get better. Baylor cross country head coach Todd Harbour is ready to start the season and is making sure not to focus on the preseason rankings too much.
“We started low last year and moved up pretty fast,” Harbour said. “It’s just a good starting place. We’d like to be ranked number one every year. We ended up being pretty good last year before it was all said and done, so the girls know that it doesn’t mean anything. We know who we are right now. We just work on getting better each day, each week, you know. The only [ranking] that counts is the one at the end of the season.”
The Bears will kick off the season hosting the Bear Twilight Invitational at 7 p.m. today at the Heart of Texas Soccer Complex.
