Badgers cross country: Women's team, two individual men's runners ready for NCAA meet

Sarah Disanza

The difficulty for Mick Byrne in getting his runners ready for the University of Wisconsin's Nuttycombe Invitational cross country meet in October was that it went against one of his major beliefs.

"We don't train for the middle of October," Byrne, the Badgers' director of cross country, said this week. "We train for Big Tens and beyond."

While the Badgers women's team posted a ninth-place finish at the Oct. 13 meet at the Thomas Zimmer Championship Course, the men struggled to a 25th-place team score.

After neither group finished in an automatic qualifying spot in the NCAA Great Lakes Regional last Friday, the difference in finish at the Nuttycombe was magnified.