By Christopher Hunt
Iona is the top-ranked team in the Northeast region. The men are ranked among the best in the country. They won their 18th straight MAAC championship Saturday. Not much has changed for the Gaels except the coach.
Ricardo Santos, a former volunteer assistant and all-American at Iona, isnow the head coach that’s leading the Gaels toward the NCAA Championships. Mick Byrne, who built the program to a national power, is now at the helm at Wisconsin on his own road to the national championships. This team, much like last year, has a legitimate chance to make the medal podium at nationals. Iona is currently ranked eighth in the nation. But first, the NCAA Northeast Regional Saturday at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
“From our standpoint, we won the regional meet the last three years and of course every time you go out there you want to win,” Santos said. “The main thing though is really to qualify for nationals and to get to the line at nationals feeling recovered and as healthy as you can.”
Iona returned the same core group that won them their second NCAA championships last year and are heavily favored to win Saturday. Santos pointed out that Columbia and Providence has top contenders. The win would be the Gaels’ sixth in the last seven years. Clearly, the team hasn’t missed a beat because of the coaching change.
“It was somewhat of an easy transition,” said senior Mohamed Khadraoui, who won the MAAC individual title as Iona finished with 15 points. “The only difference is Richardo doesn’t give us really hard workouts. They aren’t easy, it’s just the intensity is different. A lot of the workouts are almost the same.”
Santos likened his training style to Byrne’s – Byrne coached Santos to a 21st place finish at nationals in 1998 – but said they take different roads to reach the same end. The biggest difference this year, Khadraoui said, is that the team isn’t putting as much pressure on themselves.
“To be honest with you, I think we’re at about the same level as last year,” he said. “We’re looking for improvement. I felt like we slipped a little toward the end last year. … That’s one thing about last year, we got mixed up and caught up too early. We were running too hard. It wasn’t Mick’s fault it was our fault. We were excited and going out and running really hard in workouts and in races too early and it caught us at the end.”
Khadraoui said the team doesn’t talk about a potential national title nearly as much as last year. In fact they try not to think much about racing.
“We definitely try to distract ourselves,” Khadraoui said. “Me and Andrew (Ledwith), we do anything not to think about the race. We’ll play video games all day. Last year, we expended so much energy talking about nationals and thinking about it.”
Now, the Stony Brook women’s team does quite have the tradition that the Iona men’s squad does but Saturday’s race is part of the journey. The Seawolves won their second straight America East Conference title two weeks ago. Last year, Stony Brook finished second at the Northeast Regional championships. This season, it comes in as the favorite, having been the top-ranked team in the region nearly all season.
“This is the part of the season that we’ve been getting ready for since July,” head coach Andy Ronan said. “This is the big meet. If you don’t run well here you don’t go to the NCAA meet.”
The top two teams in the men’s and women’s race receive an automatic bid to the national championships, Nov. 24 in Terre Haute, Ind. Both Iona and Stony Brook have had strong enough seasons that even if they failed to finish first or second, they would still likely receive an invitation to compete for a national title.
A win Saturday would be a first in Stony Brook’s history. They finished 31st last year at NCAA’s in the team’s first-ever appearance.
“I feel like we’re as ready as we can be for (the regional) meet,” Ronan said. “To me, the making of a good program is doing things consistently. We’ve done that in the conference but now we need to do that on the next level and that means making it to the national meet every year.”
Reach Christopher Hunt at chunt@armorytrack.com.