NCAA Div I Cross Country Roundup
Photo by Kim Spir from the Bill Dellinger Invitational.
The Iona men and Princeton women won their regionals Saturday and advanced to the NCAA Division I cross country championships. Those will be held next Monday in Terre Haute, Ind., an event that will be televised live for the first time, on ESPN. Both teams are ranked among the top five in the country
In the Northeast Regional, the Stony Brook women finished 2nd, gaining an automatic berth to the NCAA, the first time in the school’s history.
The nation’s top-ranked teams both won impressively at the West Regional in Eugene, Ore., where the Oregon men and Stanford women prevailed over strong fields. The host Oregon Ducks, cheered on by several thousand local fans, were led by winner Galen Rupp, one of the favorites to win the individual NCAA championship. Teammate Shadrack Kiptoo-Biwott was 3rd, bracketed by athletes from the University of Portland, who finished a surprising 2-4-5.
The Oregon women, led by sophomore Nicole Blood, finished 2nd to Stanford to get an NCAA berth, the first time the Ducks have sent a women’s team to the nationals since 2000.
The legendary Oregon program has not won the men’s cross-country championship since the team of Alberto Salazar, Rudy Chapa, Bill McChesney, Don Clary and Matt Centrowitz won 30 years ago. That lineup still resonates today: Salazar is Rupp’s personal coach, while Chapa’s son, Joaquin, and Centrowitz’s son, Matthew, are alternates on the current Oregon squad and could wind up at the starting line on Monday.
Coach Mick Byrne’s Iona Gaels won the Northeast Regional at Franklin Park in Boston, defeating Providence 37-66. They went 3-4-5 with Kenyan Abraham Ng’etich, Ugandan newcomer Harbert Okuti and Irishman Andrew Ledwith. The remaining scorers were Moroccan Mohamed Khadraoui (Paterson, NJ) 12th and Kenyan Mathew Kiplagat 13th.
Coach Pete Farrell’s Princeton women won the Mid-Atlantic Regional at Lehigh. West Virginia edged Georgetown for 2nd, 77-79. Princeton’s score of 56 came from Liz Costello (Conestoga, Pa) 2nd, Christy Johnson (Baltimore) 4th, freshman Sarah Cummings (Corona del Mar, Calif) 14th, Megan Brandeland (Minnesota) 18th and Jolee Van Leuven (Portland, Ore) 18th. Caitlin McTague (Niskayuna, NY) and freshman Ashley Higginson (Colts Neck, NJ) were 21st and 24th.
Georgetown’s Melissa Grelli was the individual winner. Rutgers’s Cheyenne Ogletree (Garfield NJ) was a surprise 10th, getting a berth as an at-large individual runner. Georgetown also advanced as an at-large selection.
Georgetown won the men’s Mid-Atlantic race, 42-70 over Villanova, whose Bobby Curtis was the individual winner. Princeton put 3 in the top 10 but fell just short with 74 points, and was not selected as one of the 13 at-large teams either. The Tigers will send 3 individuals – David Nightingale, Michael Maag and Ben Sitler – while Matt Centrowitz’s American U. will send 2, Brendan Fennell and Steve Hallinan.
It could be another Centrowitz family get-together in Terre Haute. In addition to father and son, Matt’s daughter, Lauren, will also be on hand. A senior at Stanford, she was No. 5 for the winning Cardinal.
In Boston, Providence won the Northeast women’s race over Andy Ronan’s Stony Brook squad, 73-118. SB ran with New Zealanders Dana Hastie, Lucy Van Dulen and Holly Van Dulen; Irishwoman Laura Huet, and Jessica Hampson of Smithtown, N.Y. Hastie was their top finisher, 14th. “She dragged this team to the NCAA championships today,” Ronan said of Hastie. “I’ve never seen her give as much effort in a race as she did today.”
Individual qualifiers from this region included McKayla Plank of Iona, Lindsay Donaldson of Yale and Carmen Ballard of Columbia in the women’s race, and John Mickowski of Army, Sage Canaday of Cornell and Jeff Scull of Syracuse in the men’s.
New Yorkers won the Southeast and Mountain regions. Josh McDougal (Peru, NY) won his 4th Southeast title, for Liberty, and Lopez Lomong (Tully, NY) won the Mountain for Northern Arizona. NAU finished 3rd but advanced as an at-large selection. McDougal and Lomong are both contenders for the individual championship.
North Carolina State won both Southeast team titles in very close scoring, 69-70 over Louisville in the men’s, 106-114 over Duke in the women’s. The women’s individual winner was Brie Felnagle of North Carolina, whose Tarheels also advanced at-large.
The individual women’s favorite is Sally Kipyego of Texas Tech, the Mountain region winner and the reigning NCAA 10,000-meter champion on the track.
Her leading challengers are probably Teresa McWalters of Stanford, the West winner, and Ari Lambie, her teammate and the 3-time Pac-10 champion; Jenny Barringer of Colorado, Big 12 runnerup to Kipyego, and Felnagle.
Lambie slipped to 5th at Regional, losing to McWalters, Blood, Alex Gits of Stanford and Anita Campbell of Washington.
Gits was virtually unknown prior to the race. She is a freshman from Edina, Minn., who placed 2nd in the USATF Juniors 5,000 last summer. When McWalters and Blood pulled away midway through the race, Lambie faltered, and Gits passed a number of runners over the last mile, including better-known freshman Alex Kosinski of Oregon, who wound up 6th.
For Blood, who lost to Kosinski in the Pac-10, it was a redemptive race. “Everybody got a great start today, and that helped,” she said. “At nationals, there’s so many people, and the start is really important. It’s a new thing for us going out hard and not being so conservative. Every week we’ve gotten better, and it shows in our training and races.”
The Stanford women are going for their third consecutive national championship, all of them under Coach Peter Tegen, who came to California after a long career at Wisconsin. He also won two national titles for the Badgers in the 1980s.
The Oregon women, who were ranked 2nd nationally for much of the season, haven’t won this championship since 1987. “It’s the first time our women have qualified for the NCAAs in a while,” Ducks Coach Vin Lananna said, “so we’re thrilled to get an automatic qualifying berth.”
The Princeton women qualified to the NCAA for the 5th year in a row. Their highest finish has been 9th place, in 2003. An Eastern team has not won the NCAA since Villanova won five in a row from 1989 to 1994, five of those under Coach Marty Stern. If Stanford wins this year, it would give Tegen five wins to match Stern as the winningest women’s coach in this event.
The Colorado women have been 2nd the past 2 seasons, but they qualified only as an at-large team this year. Stanford’s winning total last year of 195 points was the highest winning score ever.
An Eastern men’s team has not won this championship in 37 years. In 1970, Jumbo Elliott’s Villanova Wildcats won it by 1 point over Oregon. The Iona men have made the NCAA the past 6 years; last year, the Gaels finished 3rd.
In recent years, the men’s race has been dominated by Colorado and Wisconsin. Colorado won last year and in 2004, while Wisconsin won in 2005 and was runnerup in 2003, ’03, ’04 and last year. The Badgers began the current season as the nation’s No.-1 ranked team, but when they were beaten by Oregon in September at the Bill Dellinger Invitational, the Ducks took over 1st and have remained there.
Lananna was the coach of three championship Stanford teams, in 1996, ’97 and 2002.
In Rupp, Oregon has a chance to have its first individual champion since Salazar won the race in 1978. (Salazar, as mentioned earlier, now coaches Rupp. In 1979, Salazar, trying to repeat, was beaten by Henry Rono of Washington State.) Salazar’s coach was Bill Dellinger, who in retirement was on hand to watch Rupp’s victory on Saturday.
Starting times Men’s 10K 12:08 p.m. Eastern time, women’s 6K 12:58
/JP/