TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — The No. 10 Michigan women’s cross country team is no stranger to the NCAA championship — the Wolverines have been friendly faces at the finals for 10 consecutive years.

Michigan coach Mike McGuire, now in his 20th year at Michigan, led the Wolverines to a 15th-place finish out of the 31 teams competing in the event. Georgetown won the six-kilometer event in Terre Haute.

The race began with redshirt Michigan senior Danielle Tauro pairing off with senior Rebecca Addison. Tauro pulled ahead halfway through the race, garnering herself a final time of 20:33.6 and finishing 45th overall in the standings.

“The plan was to kind of stay together, but I started feeling good,” Tauro said.

Addison found the pair of junior Jillian Smith and redshirt freshman Taylor Pogue and continued with them through the race. The trio finished within 16 seconds of each other.

While Monday’s course was soft and muddy, Terre Haute has never been considered an easy place even when the conditions are optimal. Tauro described the particular challenges posed by the serpentine course with lots of gradual uphill sections as deceptively tough.

“There are less opportunities for you to kind of rest and recover,” Tauro said. “You just kind of have to grind through it.”

Tauro’s plan to deal with the course?

“I started off a little easier or more conservative,” she said.

But starting off conservatively means passing by people later on — and that is never easy at this level.

“It’s a huge race so it takes more composure to move through the pack,” McGuire said. “You’re in less control of your environment in this setting.”

Tauro managed to avoid the pitfalls of “setting in,” as she called it, that is, when people pass you. Surging through, Tauro moved up through the pack towards her intended goal.

“When I got to the spot when I was in the top 50, I thought, ‘This is where I wanted to I wanted to be, within striking distance of All-American,’ ” Tauro said.

While finishing five positions short of All-American honors, Tauro did post a personal best for the course.

While the team has varied in the rankings, the performances remained rock solid this year. Finishing as the second team in the Big Ten nationally, and beating Big Ten champion Michigan State, has shown that Michigan is on the road to where it wants to be.

“We got the right people and we are doing the right things,” McGuire said. “We just got to continue to do it.”

Five of the seven runners from Monday are returning to the program next year and a couple of alternates also back on the squad. McGuire is optimistic about the younger members of the squad.

“I thought for their first time out they showed some real competitiveness and composure, and I am really happy for how they got started of their career here,” McGuire said of freshmen Brook Handler and Ellen Junewick.

As for the seniors, Mary Grace Pellegrini will continue to represent the Wolverines on the Michigan track and field team. Tauro will be graduating this December and has a little more ambitious goal in mind.

“I want to stick around in Ann Arbor for the rest of the year and train for the (Olympic) trials,” Tauro said.