Brandon Lord was born in Canada, but that’s not what made him, as his teammates joked, “the foreigner” on the University of Georgia men’s cross country team.
When UGA qualified for three consecutive national championships beginning in 2011, every runner in the men’s top-five lineup was a Georgia native, apart from Lord. Lord grew up in Chattanooga, Tenn., a mere six miles from the Georgia state line. The short distance was enough to spark the joke.
The number of in-state athletes on Georgia’s cross country team has consistently increased the last decade. In 2005, Georgia natives made up 58 percent of the team. By this year, 88 percent of the runners were from the state.
The UGA track team, for whom the 2016 indoor season begins at the Jan. 15 and 16 Blazer Invitational in Birmingham, Ala., has seen a similar increase among its middle- and long-distance runners, since all cross country athletes run track in the spring.
Because of the success of Georgia athletes in field events on the NCAA and international levels, scholarship money for out-of-state athletes has gravitated toward this area. The HOPE academic scholarship awarded to Georgia residents makes it easier for in-state runners to fill the cross country and track rosters.
“My goal is to have an all-around strong team, but we cannot forget where we come from,” Georgia head coach Petros Kyprianou said. “We are a field events team and that’s our backbone. We've got to take care of that.”
The growing number of in-state cross country runners has motivated the Bulldogs to prove they can still earn similar accomplishments as programs with greater financial resources. In 2012, Georgia had its best finish in program history when it placed 19th at the national championship.
“Here’s just a bunch of Georgia kids who are on book scholarships,” said senior Zack Sims, who was Georgia’s top finisher at this year’s NCAA regional. “We weren’t superstars in high school, and we beat all these kids at Oregon who are probably on full scholarships, getting all this fancy gear and were world class in high school.”
Indoor and outdoor track and field and cross country all must share the same scholarship allotment — 18 scholarships for women and 12.6 for men, according to Kyprianou.
Since all teams in the NCAA must spread financial resources across track and cross country, success is often dependent upon which states have the most high school ability.
“There are programs that are successful at both, and those programs are typically found in states where there is a heavy pool of talent,” said Patrick Gomez, University of Oklahoma volunteer assistant coach.
Gomez said talent-rich states are typically those with high populations, such as California and Texas, and those in the Pacific Northwest.
“Georgia is a state, in terms of high school running, that isn’t top-notch, so we have a lot we want to prove people wrong about,” Sims said. “It definitely fires you up.”
At this year’s Southeastern Conference cross country championship, Texas A&M finished second with a team of 96 percent in-state runners. Georgia placed fifth.
Sims and fellow UGA senior Steven Spevacek receive only enough athletic scholarship money to cover their textbooks. However, they, like the other UGA distance runners who are Georgia natives, can benefit from the HOPE and Zell Miller academic scholarships, which are available to Georgia residents who obtained certain GPA and test scores benchmarks in high school.
“Cross country athletes are better students most of the time,” Kyprianou said. “They’re almost 95 percent getting the HOPE and (it) really helps them cover a lot more than what we’re offering them.”
Nearly 90 percent of distance track runners are from Georgia, but in the sprint and field events, only 38 percent are from in state and just as many have international hometowns.
For athletes from outside the country or even outside the state, earning an athletic scholarship is sometimes the only way it’s reasonable to attend UGA.
“Back home the universities were free so our parents never get to save up money for college,” said junior high jumper Tatiana Gusin, who was born in Moldova and then lived in Greece. “If I was not on scholarship, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
Cross country’s recruiting reach, however, primarily stretches across the state, rather than across the globe.
Still, even with HOPE scholarships available since 1993, UGA has been able only in recent years to obtain the top runners from Georgia.
Sims credits former coach Jeff Pigg, who led the cross country team from 2008 to 2011, with establishing UGA cross country as high-quality program that could attract the best in-state high school runners.
“The best in-state program was Georgia State at the time,” Sims said. “A lot of kids, if they were good in Georgia, they didn’t want to go to UGA.”
Georgia’s men have placed in the top five at NCAA regionals in six of the last seven years, and by 2011, three of the state’s top-six high school runners in AAAAA opted to attend UGA.
Even without a scholarship, runners are attracted to UGA because it’s a Division I program.
“People want to go to Athens for the college life and the whole experience,” said James Tigue, who coaches cross country at Lambert High School in Suwanee. “A lot of kids would forgo getting a scholarship if they can walk-on and be on a DI program.”
Even as some of the state’s best runners decide to run at Georgia, Cunniff said he still focuses on recruiting athletes who are not necessarily high school standouts, but can be developed into successful college runners.
“It’s very tricky to find kids that are talented but in a lot of ways aren’t showing too much talent, so that we get them to choose Georgia and don’t end up in bidding battles,” Georgia cross country coach Patrick Cunniff said.
Former Georgia runner Kyle James, who majored in finance and economics, studied data from every runner at the 2011 and 2012 national championship to try to discover what predicts collegiate success.
“Often times, it’s runners from states where cross country isn’t necessarily super competitive and also runners who may be undertrained in high school,” James said. “They may have a coach that’s inexperienced or they played four other sports in high school and weren’t tapping into all of their potential.”
James said he gave the results to Cunniff for him to use while recruiting.
“We actually talk on a fairly regular basis,” James said. “While I don’t think he's going into a meeting with a recruit and looking at my paper right before it, it did sort of solidify things with how to approach recruiting.”
When Brian Detweiler raced for Georgia and the team earned its best ever cross country national finish in 2012, he said the group of runners was essentially an “all-star” team of high school graduates from the state of Georgia.
Most of the current UGA runners know each other from racing together prior to college. Now, the school name written across their chests matches the state in which they grew up. That’s the way they want it to be.
“This team has largely been home-grown from in-state kids,” Spevacek said, “We take pride in that.”
— The Grady Sports Bureau of part of the sports media program at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
