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For the team to succeed, O’Hara said, they will need to use their experience, but will also rely heavily on new recruits. Because the team is so small, there needs to be a greater group effort than in years past.

O’Hara said senior captains Keidra Anderson and Sara Warnke need to stay healthy to lead the team.
While the seniors will need to score well consistently, the rest of the team needs to perform their best.

“On this team, it’s really hard to separate importance, because everyone is important. Everybody’s got to have a good race, and everybody’s got to finish,” O’Hara said.

O’Hara has coached track at Hamline for three years, but only this season did she step into her current position as head coach of the cross country team.

When coaching track, O’Hara worked with sprinters, hurdlers and other multi-event athletes. Thus, her work was spread thinly. This is not the case, she said, with the cross country team, where the focus is on one task which is to be completed by a singular group. The team has made the transition easy.

“They are so coachable, and they have a work ethic that is second to no one that I have ever seen.”
It remains to be seen if the team will finish well at the conference level. Because of their small numbers,
O’Hara will not be running a full team every weekend, so as to prevent injuries in overworked athletes.
That means the team may not always be scored in meets, but O’Hara doesn’t feel that will be an issue. While it will be hard for some runners to stay motivated and on top of their game when the team won’t benefit from their work, O’Hara believes that the team will be able to stay on track. With a team this size, the team can’t afford to lose their composure. That’s when mistakes are made.

“Hopefully, being smart about the training and being smart about when people race is going to mean that we have a full team at the end of the season, which is when it really counts,” O’Hara said.