By ELLIOTT DENMAN
NEW YORK - Hard-core college cross country fans know that the NCAA Division I Championships haven’t been held at Van Cortlandt Park since 1969.
And they’re resigned to knowing that the nation’s biggest undergraduate harrier extravaganza isn’t likely to return to “Vanny.” the mecca of the sport in the north Bronx, any year soon.
So they make do with what they’re given and what they’re given on the final Friday of each year is absolutely first rate.
Once again, that final-Friday story line held true as two major collegiate conference meets took place at Van Cortlandt October 30 and delivered some stirring men’s and women’s action, red-hot team performances, and some dazzling individual racing.
The venerable Ivy League Heptagonal Championships - first staged in 1939 - kicked it off and the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Championships - dating back to 1981 - wrapped it up.
Add the 70 Ivy-Hep meets to the 29 MAAC meets and you have exactly
99 years of sterling memories.
Some years back, the final-Friday scenario actually comprised a tripleheader also involving the Big East Championships but, alas, it took a trip to Milwaukee to catch the 2009 Big East title races.
One more time, the final-Friday racing at "Vanny" was memorable.
On the team front, nothing could have been more impressive than Princeton’s unprecedented 1-2-3-4-5 sweep of the top places in the Ivy race for the
perfect score of 15 points, enabling each of these young ladies to be able
to say forever - some team, some year, somewhere down the road may possibly equal what we did, although it’s a long shot, but no team can ever-ever-ever do it better than we did that last Friday of October in ‘09.
There simply was no holding these determined Tigers of Coach Peter Farrell over the 5,000-meter route (slightly amended from previous years due to park construction work.) Tiger Liz Costello roared to the individual gold in 16:55.7 and hard on her heels were teammates Alex Banfich (17:12.9), Sarah Cummings (17:55.5), Ashley Higginson (17:18.0) and Reilly Kiernan (17:21.5.)
For Costello, a senior from Strafford, Pa. who’d been a standout at Conestoga High School four years ago, it was her third straight Ivy individual crown.
The best challenger the rest of the eight-team Ivy pack could produce was
sixth-placer Claire Richardson of Harvard (17:28.1) The Harvard team took second place, too, with a far-distant total of 69 points; as a consolation prize, this was the Harvard women’s top Ivy finish since 1995.
Farrell, of course, has a distinguished lineage in the sport. At Notre Dame, he was a national-caliber middle distance runner and record-setter. His brother, St. John’s grad Peter Farrell, was a two-time USA Olympian in the 800 meters andbronze medalist in the 1968 Mexico City Games. And Peter Farrell’s Tiger teams have been the scourge of the Ivies for much of his 32-year tenure.
Tiger pupils keep responding to Farrell's coaching with golden performance after golden performance. Most celebrated
Farrell pupil of all remains Lynn Jennings, the Tiger alumna whose bronze medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics remains one of the all-time feats in American women’s distance annals.
Just a single point in the men’s five-mile race kept Princeton from heading back to Mercer County, New Jersey, as claimant to the Ivy Daily Double.
Alas, that lone digit belonged to Coach Willie Wood’s Columbia Lions, who edged out Coach Steve Dolan’s Princeton Tigers for the men’s title, 60 points to 61.
Princeton had won the Ivy-Hep men’s title the past four years but it just wasn’t to be in 2009.
After Harvard’s Dan Chenoweth (a junior from Geneseo, Ill.) led the way in a decisive 25:09.2 win over the five-mile route, followed by Brown’s Christian Escareno (25:19.7), the battle for the men’s team crown was underway.
Brian Leung, the Tigers’ sensational sophomore out of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, just a few miles from the Princeton campus, got it going with a solid third place in 25:28.0.
But Columbia got rolling with Brendan Martin’s fifth place, Kyle Merber’s eighth, Terrence Prial’s 12th and Justin Heck’s 15th. Meanwhile, the Tigers were adding Donn Cabral in sixth, Rob Speare in 11th and Mark Amirault in 18th.
So, after four runners over the line for each team, Princeton held a two-point lead, 38 points to 40, and it all boiled down the duel of the “anchormen,” the fifth-placers.
This is the situation that cross country purists just love, the element
that makes it such an intense team sport rather than just a gaggle of
individual endeavors.
You could sense all the mental arithmetic taking place on the sidelines, by both coaches and enthusiasts of the top two teams, as the story evolved.
It was all “if, if, if,” as runners kept barreling over the finish line.
Could Princeton’s Sean Wilson fight off Columbia’s Anthony Merra? Or at least stay within a single place behind him? Call it drama-drama-drama, of the sport’s finest kind.
Within seconds, the speculations were over. There was Merra, in the Columbia Light Blue, checking in at 26:00.3, good for 20th place. But Cornell’s Charlie Hatch and Dartmouth’s Kevin Treadway squeezed home in front of Wilson.
Bottom line: The all-important differential was nine tenths of a second, all that separated Treadway (26:10.9) from Wilson (26:11.8) and determined the team winner.
There was another kind of excitement in the team duel for third place. When all the numbers were in, it boiled down to a 90-90 tie, a Cornell-Dartmouth deadlock.
Soon, after the Jeffrey H. Orleans Trophies - new for 2009, honoring the 25-year Ivy League administrator and cross country devotee who retired earlier this year - were presented and celebrations done, it was time for the MAAC runners to take over.
The MAAC script turned out to be a very familiar story.
Iona College’s men won it for the 19th straight year and the Iona women
held up their end of the agreeement, winning for the fifth consecutive year.
LaSalle (no longer a MAAC winner) was the last league team to outrun Iona for the league men’s crown, back in 1990, and that was a close one, too, 52 points to 59. Marist was the most recent MAAC rival to outrun the Iona women, doing it in 2004.
Apart from the University of Portland (Oregon), which has now won the West Coast Conference title for 31 straight years, the Iona men’s 19-year MAAC winning streak is the longest consecutive run of conference XC triumphs in America.
When Mick Byrne relinquished the Iona XC coaching reins a year and a half ago, to take the job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, some predicted the Golden Gaels’ entire distance program might be undergoing a period of readjustment.
But it certainly hasn’t happened that way.
Ricardo Santos, an Iona graduate, a past IC4A champion and NCAA All-American for the Gaels who had been serving as assistant coach at Harvard since 2005, took over job of directing his alma mater’s men’s and women’s teams, and the New Rochelle, N.Y. school has hardly missed a beat since.
The Iona men were not as perfect as the Princeton women, but they weren’t that far off that kind of pace, either.
A 1-2-3 slam by Ryan Sheridan (25:37.1), Thorsten Baumeister (25:41.5) and Alexander Soderberg (25:42.1) got Iona off to a red-hot start.
Only a fourth-place finish by Loyola’s Dan McDevitt (in 25:49.3) spoiled the Iona bid for perfection, because the Gaels snared the next two spots with Leonard Korir (25:59.2) and Doug Holt (26:03.9.)
For backup support, the depth-filled Iona team put Josh Hibbs in eighth and Joe Parks in ninth.
Add it all up and the Iona men had just 17 points, totally outclassing 2-3 finishers Marist (57 points) and Rider (115) and sixth other MAAC squads.
Still, these 2009 Gaels weren’t as dominant as six previous teams.
The Iona squads of 2008, 2005, 2004, 2000, 1995 and 1992 all won with
perfect 15-point scores.
In the MAAC women’s race (held over the 6,000-meter distance), Iona was off and running when Anna
Holm-Jorgensen took the individual gold in 22:40.9 and teammates Marion Joly-Testault (22:55.2) and Annalore Dessaedeleer( 23:21.0) grabbed the 3-4 spots. Only other runner in front of them was second-placer Addie DiFrancesco of Marist (22:51.8.)
Kristen Peluso’s seventh place and Ashling Baker’s 12th neatly wrapped up Iona’s winning total of 27 points. Marist (56) settled for second, with Canisius (66) third.
While the Iona men have been 15-point perfect six times, the Iona women have never quite matched that number. Their best was a 17-point score in 2006; Holy Cross (no longer a MAAC member) remains the only perfect team in MAAC women’s annals, with its 15-point score in the very first MAAC
women’s race, back in 1983.
Iona junior Ryan Sheridan, out of Long Island’s Walt Whitman High School, surely rates as one of America’s rising young distance talents. A 4:20 high school miler, he improved all the way to NCAA All-America status over 5,000 meters last outdoor track season.
Scorers for the Ivy champion Princeton women and Columbia men are all USA products but the Iona squads are solidly international.
For the Iona men, Baumeister is a sophomore from Strohn, Germany; Soderberg a sophomore from Saltsjobaden, Sweden, and Korir a sophomore from Iten, Kenya. They have teammates, too, from Ireland and Australia.
On the Iona women’s squad, led by Holm-Jorgensen, a graduate student from Broenshoj, Denmark, there’s Joly-Testault, a freshman from Gex, France; Dessaedeleer, a graduate student from Dworp, Belgium; and Baker, a senior from Sandymount, Ireland. Other teammates hail from England and Australia.
For all these top squads, next stop will be the NCAA Regionals on Saturday, Nov. 14, with the Northeast section slated for Boston’s Franklin Park and the Mid-Atlantic event set for the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore.
The best of them advance to the NCAA Finals, Nov. 23 in Terre haute, Indiana.
Through late October, the NCAA coaches’ ranking polls listed Stanford number one and Iona 11th of all USA men’s teams, with Washington and Villanova 1-2 of the women, and Princeton seventh.
Just one major college showdown remains on the 2009 “Vanny” schedule, and that’s the 101st edition of the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A) Championships for men, and the companion Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Championships for women,
Saturday, Nov. 21st.
Althought the collegiate landscape has changed, the IC4A and ECAC meets remain major targets for Northeast teams and individuals. With over a century of history behind them, they still continue to be viable objectives. But if you wanted to see the very best of the Ivies and MAACs and weren’t at “Vanny” on October 30th, you missed a very special day at the races.