In its first truly competitive meet, the ISU cross country team will be running on its home course Friday at the ISU Open.

The meet starts with the women’s 5-K race at 5 p.m., followed by the men’s 8-K.

Men’s head coach Corey Ihmels said that the meet is meaningful simply because it is the first home meet for the team after the “workout” meet it competed in last week at Drake.

“It’s big in a sense because it’s home,” Ihmels said. “It’s no bigger than that. It’s fun to run at home. It’s something [for the guys] to get excited about.”

Ihmels said the men will be competing against Drake, Truman State, Simpson, Graceland, William Penn and North Dakota State.

Ihmels said it’s hard to say how good those teams will be.

He said he expects Drake to be fairly competitive, as it was last year.

“I haven’t seen their roster this year,” Ihmels said.

This will be the first year of Division I competition for North Dakota State.

“They should be ready to go,” Ihmels said.

Last week at the Drake meet, Ihmels said the ISU men had a lot of excitement.

One of his concerns is that the team will get too lackadaisical at this home meet.

In practice, Ihmels said that his team makes little adjustments now that meets have started.

“We make little adjustments as we go,” Ihmels said.

“We’re getting into the season, into more interval work. We’re still training hard, [and we will] until we get into the championship season.”

On the women’s side, head coach Dick Lee said he feels this is the first “real meet” of the season.

“It’s the first competitive run for the kids,” Lee added. “[We’ve] got a long ways to go to get in shape.”

He said the women should remember that the season record is not as important as its record in October and November.

Lee said what truly matters is how well the team does at the conference meet in late October.

“Wins and losses have no bearing on your conference success,” Lee said.

At this meet, Lee said he wants his front four or five runners to stay together for the first three kilometers of the race. The women will be competing against the same schools as the men, excluding Drake.