The Northwestern Oklahoma State men's cross-country team will enter their 2017 season ranked in sixth place in the Great American Conference Pre-season Coaches Poll. The Rangers received 11 votes, five more than seventh-place Arkansas-Monticello.

East Central, winners of three straight conference championships, will enter the season as the pre-season favorite after receiving 25 total votes and five of the first-place votes. Harding received the other two first-place votes, followed by Oklahoma Baptist, Southern Arkansas, and then Southern Nazarene.

New head coach Jill Lancaster will lead the Rangers a year off of finishing in fifth place at the 2016 GAC Championship Meet. A reinvented roster will give Lancaster and company a whole new outlook looking ahead to the 2017 season.

Two key junior college transfers in Clayton Fletcher and Tumiso Tidimane will be joined with an array of talented freshmen looking to move up the conference standings. Fletcher and Tidimane both bring winning experience from the junior college level to coach Lancaster's team, as Tidimane qualified twice for the NJCAA National Cross Country Meet while at Dodge City Community College and Fletcher was a member of both the Indoor and Outdoor Regional Championship team his freshman year at Butler Community College.

The Rangers will kick off their season on Sept. 2 in Edmond at the UCO Land Run, and compete in four more events leading up to the Great American Conference Championship Meet held in Magnolia, Arkansas.