Season in Review: 2017 Men's Cross Country

Redshirt senior Ben Flanagan and a veteran Wolverines squad returned to the top of the Big Ten and the top-10 nationally during the 2017 campaign.

• Big Ten Conference: Team Champion
• NCAA Great Lakes Region: 2nd Place
• NCAA Championships: 10th Place

The University of Michigan men's cross country team had a "Cinderella" season this fall, going from unranked nationally at the start of the year to a prolific postseason run that re-established the Wolverines as a national contender on the trails. Led by a corps of redshirt seniors -- including All-American Ben Flanagan, Connor Mora and Aaron Baumgarten -- the Wolverines improved each and every meet of the season, leading up to its second Big Ten title in three seasons and a 10th-place finish at the NCAA Championships. Head coach Kevin Sullivan's squad proved its versatility and veteran guile by utilizing, as races demanded, either calculated patience or frontrunning prowess to achieve success in the regular season, the Big Ten championships and the NCAA postseason.

Men's Cross Country

Team Highlights

• Paced by an All-American 20th-place finish from Flanagan, the Wolverines employed and executed a savvy race plan to surge through the field late and secure a 10th-place team finish at the NCAA Cross Country Championships -- the program's second top-10 finish in the last three seasons in addition to an 11th-place effort in 2014.

Michigan's five scorers -- Flanangan, Mora, Baumgarten, Jack Aho and Isaac Harding -- combined to pass 51 runners during the final two kilometers (1.25 miles), a total exceeded only by sixth-place Oregon and fifth-place Arkansas. Baumgarten accounted for 19 of them on his own during that span, with Aho and Flanagan running down 12 and 10, respectively.

• Their race at NCAAs played out much differently than their Big Ten-title winning performance three weekends earlier, as the Wolverines ran from the front from the start and held off hard-charging Michigan State and Wisconsin squads for their second crown in the past three seasons, 71-82-88. Flanagan earned first team All-Big Ten honors with a sixth-place finish -- contending for the win until the very end after taking the lead with a kilometer to go -- while Baumgarten and Mora were second-team honorees with 11th and 14th-place finishes, respectively.

Not only did the Wolverines have all five of their scorers finish top-25 overall -- a feat no other team accomplished on the day -- they had seven runners through the line by that point with 18th-place Harding, 22nd-place Ben Hill, 23rd-place Aho and 25th-place Keenan Rebera. Not since Indiana in 2013 had a Big Ten team put seven runners in the top-25 at the conference meet.

• That postseason run came unforeseen by the national pollsters at the beginning of the season as the Wolverines were unranked by the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA), Flotrack and DyeStat throughout the early portions of the season. After promising season-opening performances at home and at North Carolina State, Michigan made its first splash of the season with a fourth-place finish at the Notre Dame Joe Piane Invitational over numerous nationally ranked teams, and then turned in a more impressive eighth-place showing at the prestigious Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational two weeks later.

Men's Cross Country

Individual Highlights

• Returning for one final season after an injury kept him away from the trails -- and, for the most part, from the track -- in the 2016-2017 academic year, Flanagan made the most of his Michigan fall finale in compiling one of the best individual seasons in program history. He joined head coach Sullivan as the only other man in program history to collect a regional title (one of his three individual wins in 2017), All-America honors and Big Ten Athlete of the Year honors in the same season.

Flanagan finished no lower than 22nd place throughout the course of the year, and he only got stronger as the races got longer. When the competition distance switched from eight kilometers (4.97 miles) to 10 kilometers (6.21 miles) for the NCAA postseason, he responded with a Great Lakes Region title and a 20th-place finish at nationals. During the latter performance, he ran down 10 of the nation's top runners during the final two kilometers of the race over what is arguably the most difficult portion of the course at E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kentucky.

• After receiving word late in the summer that a request for a medical hardship redshirt was approved, Mora took full advantage of his final opportunity to run cross country in the Maize and Blue. In each of his five races this year, Mora finished no lower than third in the Michigan lineup, culminating in a near All-America performance at the NCAA Championships as he took 48th overall. Along the way he earned second team All-Big Ten and USTFCCCA All-Region honors, employing to great success a strategy of running at or near the front of the pack from early on.

• Baumgarten, meanwhile, used the opposite strategy to equal effect: be patient early and make a big move late. Surging through the pack late became a hallmark of Baumgarten's style in 2017, highlighted by a 61-spot climb from the four-kilometer split through the 10K finish at the NCAA Championships to finish 73rd overall. Like Mora, he garnered second team All-Big Ten and USTFCCCA All-Region distinctions in the lead-up to the NCAA Championships.

• Following behind the redshirt senior leadership of Flanagan, Mora and Baumgarten (as well as Billy Bund and Micah Beller) was a corps of underclassman talent that will be the future of Michigan cross country. True freshman Aho was 122nd at NCAAs as the Wolverines' fourth scorer and earned All-Region honors the week prior, while redshirt freshman Harding rounded out the U-M scoring at nationals in 124th after also earning All-Region honors. Redshirt sophomore Hill and redshirt freshman Rebera were both top-25 at Big Tens, and Hill just missed All-Region by one spot.

Honors and Awards

Ben
Flanagan

Connor
Mora

Aaron
Baumgarten

Jack
Aho

Isaac
Harding

All-American
Ben Flanagan

Big Ten Conference
All-Big Ten (First Team): Ben Flanagan
All-Big Ten (Second Team): Aaron Baumgarten, Connor Mora
Sportsmanship Award: Ben Flanagan

NCAA Great Lakes Region
USTFCCCA All-Region: Ben Flanagan, Connor Mora, Aaron Baumgarten, Jack Aho

Big Ten Athlete of the Week
Ben Flanagan (Sept. 20)

Academic All-Big Ten (16)
Aaron Baumgarten, Sr., master's mechanical engineering
Micah Beller, Sr., master's management
Billy Bund, Sr., economics
Ben Flanagan, Sr., master's interpersonal practice/mental health
Kevin Hall, Jr., economics
Isaac Harding, So., kinsesiology undetermined
Jordy Hewitt, So., international studies
Ben Hill, Jr., education
Jacob Lee, So., LSA undeclared
Andrew Lorant, So., LSA undeclared
Garrett McPeek, Jr., mechanical engineering
Connor Mora, Sr., sport management
Matt Plowman, Jr., industrial and operations engineering