By Jack Pfeifer
NYU lost most of its Div. III national-championship team to graduation, so Nick McDonough’s 2008 squad was barely on the radar screen. As the cross country season reached its halfway point, this year’s young Violets were ranked 26th nationally.
Not any longer.
Led by Jesse Schneider, the lone returnee from last year’s championship team, NYU won the Oberlin College Inter-Regional Rumble in Ohio and in the process defeated seven schools that had been ranked ahead of them in Div. III.
“This was the first real test for us against nationally ranked teams,” McDonough said. “This shows that even with a whole new lineup this season, we have the depth to compete on the national level.”
Schneider, a senior from Delhi, N.Y., won the 8K race in 24:43, as NYU won with 47 points, ahead of ranked teams Dickinson (2nd place, ranked 14th U.S., 104 points), Ohio Northern (3-115), St. Lawrence (133), Allegheny (155), Mount Union (177), Case Western Reserve and Carnegie-Mellon.
“Jesse ran a smart race the whole way,” McDonough said. “He went out with the leaders, sat in there until the pack thinned out and then pushed the last mile.”
The other scorers were Zach Maher (pictured left), a junior from Carmel, N.Y., 5th; Calvin Lee, a junior from North Valley, N.J., 10th; Matt Turlip, a sophomore from Dunellen, N.J., 14th, and Mark Hess, a senior from Morristown, N.J., 17th. “We finished in a tight pack, with only 34 seconds separating our top five runners,” McDonough said. The 6th and 7th men were sophomore Sebastian Schwelm (Berkeley, Calif.) and freshman Peter Murphy (Millburn, N.J.).
Nationally, as teams gear up for conference championships over the next two weekends, the big race last week was the Division I Pre-Nationals at Terre Haute, held on the Indiana State course that will be used for the NCAA Championships next month.
The meet was conducted in balanced competitions of Blue and White races for each sex, along with secondary Open races.
The men’s races were won by Alabama and Stanford, propelling each of those teams higher in this week’s national rankings. Alabama, led by JC transfer Tyson David, who won the Blue race in 23:30.1, moved up one spot to 5th. Stanford jumped all the way from 10th to 2nd, just behind the nation’s No. 1 team, Oregon, giving the Pacific-10 Conference the top two spots nationally in both sexes. Most of the Ducks took the week off, although Oregon’s B squads won a small meet in Portland, Ore., while their men’s ace, Galen Rupp, used the occasion to execute a breathtaking 6-mile track workout.
Rupp, who finished 2nd in the NCAA a year ago, losing a stretch duel with Josh McDougal of Liberty, and who ran the Olympic 10,000 in Beijing just a few months ago, has not run a cross-country race yet this fall. He is expected to debut at Pac-10 in Springfield, Ore., Oct. 31.
His likely rival at this year’s NCAA is yet another Liberty runner, Samuel Chelanga, who transferred to the Virginia school from Fairleigh Dickinson a year ago. Chelanga showed top form over the weekend, winning the Pre-Nationals White race in 22:51.3, a record for the 8K course. “I was just trying to push myself and test myself to compete nationally,” Chelanga told Don Kopriva of Track Newsletter. “I feel pretty confident and wasn’t that tired at the end of the race.” He finished 43 seconds ahead of Felix Kiboiywo of Auburn.
Rupp showed he’s ready for the challenge. He skipped his scheduled debut at the Mike Hodges Invitational in Clackamas, Ore., and ran a workout instead after his personal coach, Alberto Salazar, decided that would be a better approach for Rupp, who has a history of injuries on uneven surfaces. ‘I was a little disappointed, but it’d be silly to take a risk and get hurt,” Rupp told Doug Binder of The Oregonian.
Rupp and Salazar instead went to the Nike campus in nearby Beaverton, swept the fallen leaves out of Lane 1 and ran Oregon’s legendary “30-40,” a punishing workout devised by the former Oregon coach, Bill Dellinger, in which the first 200 is run at 40-second pace, the second at 30-second pace, repeated for as long as you can take it without a break. Rupp demonstrated his fitness by running 24 laps, just short of 6 miles, in 27:57, the farthest anyone has reportedly gone on this regimen.
“The record was 5 miles, by Steve Prefontaine,” Salazar said. “I think the furthest I ever made was 4 miles.”
Rupp was satisfied. “I thought I’d struggle to get through 4 miles,” he told Binder. “I just took it one lap at a time.”
For Rupp, this is his final college cross country season. An Oregon Duck hasn’t been national cross country champion in 30 years. Salazar won the title in 1978.
In Rupp’s absence at Clackamas, a fellow 2008 Olympian, Andrew Wheating, ran his first race of the season, winning a 4K race alongside teammate Matthew Centrowitz, who ran unattached. Centrowitz, a sophomore, may redshirt, but that move does not have to be made until conference. “We’ll delay that decision as long as we can,” said the Oregon coach, Vin Lananna. “We’ll use Centro if we need him.”
Stanford won the White race in Terre Haute with 77 points, with Iona 2nd at 123. Stanford was led by senior Garrett Heath (3rd) and Illinois freshman Chris Derrick (4th). The New Yorker Hakon DeVries finished 25th as the Cardinal’s 4th man. Iona was led by Andrew Ledwith (9th), Harbert Okuti (15th) and Mohamed Khadraoui (16th). The Gaels remain 7th in the national rankings.
Stanford’s move to 2nd displaced Oklahoma State one notch, although the Cowboys did receive 4 of the 12 1st-place votes. That may be in part because OSU ducked theWhite/Blue races and ran in the lesser Open instead, where they finished an easy 1-2-3 with star frosh German Fernandez (23:34) and Colby Lowe (23:57) bracketing transfer John Kosgei (23:44). Coach Dave Smith called Fernandez’s effort an easy “tempo run.”
Princeton, West Virginia women win
The Princeton and West Virginia women’s teams won separate races over the weekend and stayed in the top 5 nationally. Meanwhile, the Villanova women finished 2nd to top-ranked Washington in the Pre-National Blue race to move up to 6th in the rankings. Along with Georgetown (11th), that sets up a big meeting with WVa (4th) and ‘Nova (5th) at the Big East Championships Oct. 31 at Van Cortlandt Park. Coach Pete Farrell’s Princeton Tigers will contest the Heps the same day at VCP.
Princeton tied Florida State (ranked 3rd) with 89 points in the White race. FSU’s Susan Kuijken tied the course record, running 19:49, ahead of Michigan’s Nicole Edwards. Princeton’s Liz Costello was 5th, teammate Jolee van Leuven 33rd, Michigan’s Danielle Tauro 35th and Stony Brook’s Holly Van Dalen 38th.
West Virginia won the Penn State Nationals in State College with 40 points, despite the absence of its ace, Marie-Louise Asselin, who stayed behind to take a chemistry exam. Mountaineer Kari Bland was 2nd to Lindsay Carson, from the Canadian college, Guelph. Bridget Franek of the host Nittany Lions was 4th, Sarah Bowman of Tennessee 5th and Shippensburg frosh Neely Spence 6th.
The top-ranked Washington Huskies won the Blue race with just 36 points, 90 fewer than Villanova. North Carolina senior Brie Felnagle – a native of Washington state herself – won in 20:02, while the UW went 4-5-6-8 with frosh Kendra Schaaf and Christine Babcock plus Marie Lawrence and Katie Follett. “Kendra was nervous, and it was the first 6K Christine had ever run,” Washington Coach Greg Metcalf told Jon Hendershott of Track & Field News. “So those were really the two big reasons that we went (to Terre Haute) and they learned valuable lessons. They’ll have a certain level of familiarity when we get back there.
“But we walked away from the meet and now our attention is focused on going to Eugene on Oct. 31 and doing the very best job we can at the Pac-10 championships.”
That meet promises to be a war, as the top-ranked Oregon men will face No. 2 Stanford and the top-ranked Washington women will face No. 2 Oregon as well as highly regarded Stanford and Arizona State.
“Oregon at home will be very hard to beat,” Metcalf said, “but we’ll go give it a shot and ... do everything we can.”
On top of that, Stanford has won 12 Pac-10 championships in a row and the last three NCAAs.
Over the weekend, the Oregon women rested most of their top runners. In their absence, graduate student Lindsey Scherf won her first race for the Ducks, finishing 10 seconds ahead of teammate Zoe Buckman.
Kipyego debuts for Texas Tech
Sally Kipyego, two-time national champion, opened her 2008 season, winning the Chile Pepper in Fayetteville, Ark., and leading her Texas Tech squad to the team title as well. Kipyego finished 16 seconds ahead of Virginia Tech’s Tasmin Fanning, and the Red Raiders outscored host Arkansas 72-101. Lillian Badaru of Tech was 3rd, Silje Fjortoft of SMU 4th.
Texas A&M won the men’s championship, defeating the host Razorbacks 52-75. Shadrack Songok led A&M in 3rd place, behind fellow Kenyans Daniel Kirwa of Harding (Div. II) and Samuel Kosgei of Lamar. Seth Summerside finished 6th for Arkansas.
The Penn State men’s race was won by Georgetown, whose Andrew Bumbalough finished 1st. The Hoyas are ranked 10th nationally.
The Princeton men won their own Princeton Invitational over St. Joe’s, Duquesne and Columbia. The Tigers’ Michael Maag was individual winner.
The Marist men and Brown women were winners of the Albany Invitational. Marist’s Girma Segni won the men’s race.
Zola Budd Pieterse, now 42 years old and the mother of three youngsters, finished 1st at the Blue Ridge Open, running as an unattached competitor. Pieterse, who set several World Junior distance records as a teenager in South Africa and who later got tangled up with Mary Decker Slaney in the 1984 Olympic 3,000, now lives in Myrtle Beach, S.C., with her husband, and is a volunteer coach at Coastal Carolina.
In other smaller weekend meetings, the Geneseo women won the Yellowjacket Invitational in Rochester, N.Y.; the Johns Hopkins women defeated Haverford and Susquehanna at Gettysburg; Colby (30) defeated Bowdoin (46) and Bates (57) in the Maine Women’s Champs, and the North Carolina men won the Blue Ridge Open over Queens University and Duke.
In one of the most important dual meets of the season, the Army men defeated Navy by 1 point, 27-28, at Annapolis; the Navy women blitzed their West Point counterparts, 15-48.