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BY TIMOTHY BERNSTEIN

In print | Published November 5, 2009

The men’s and women’s cross country teams spent the afternoon of Halloween on Saturday at the 2009 Centennial Conference Championships at Gettysburg College.

Adding to a stellar debut year, John McMinn ’13 led the Garnet men in the championship race with a 27:59.96 finish over the eight-kilometer course, good for 21st place overall in 99-man field. As a team, Swarthmore finished sixth, an improvement over seventh last year, while the title went to Dickinson for the second year in a row.

Dickinson won the meet on the strength of the top four individual finishes, with senior Greg Leak defending his 2008 championship in 26:30.71.

While the sixth place finish wasn’t what the Garnet men hoped for, it was an impressive result considering the conditions on race day. Swarthmore, along with the other teams in the meet, was forced to battle less than ideal course conditions as well as key absences due to illness.

Michael Fleischmann ’13 said the course was “unbelievably muddy — the muddiest course we had run all season.”
Four-year veteran David Riccardi ’10 was pleased with the result considering the circumstances. “While we were disappointed that we did not reach our preseason goal … we had reasons to be optimistic,” he said. Riccardi explained that four of the Garnet’s top runners (Zach Gershenson ’12, Bill King ’13, Jacob Phillips ’13 and Jonnie Tompkins ’10) were sidelined for the conference race by the H1N1 outbreak on campus. Another runner, he said, ran despite having the flu.

With the 21st-place finish, McMinn headlined what has proven to be a top notch group of first-year runners for the Garnet. Brian King ’13 crossed the line in 33rd place with a time of 28:35.94, while Aidan Dumont McCaffrey ’13 took 45th place, coming in at 29.21.47. The trio was second, third, and sixth among first-year runners at the meet. Their success is especially promising in a sport that favors age. The top 20 finishers included only four sophomores and just one first-year.

Garnet head coach Peter Carroll was pensive following the race.

“I thought things went okay, considering [the absences],” Carroll said. “Cross-country isn’t a sport where someone sick or hurt can play ten minutes, then sub out and come back in. Your skills diminish over the course of a race.”

“Not to make excuses,” he added. “We got sixth; best-case, I think we could have gotten fifth, but we’ll give Haverford a shot [at the Mid-East Regional Meet] and see if we have a few tricks up our sleeve.”

Chris Wickham ’12 finished in 62nd place in a time of 30:14.20, while Patrick Hartnett ’11 crossed the line in 65th place (30:26.83) to round out the scoring for Swarthmore, which was the only team not to score a senior in the meet — another good omen for the future.

“It should definitely get better,” Fleischmann said of the strong crew of newcomers that has anchored the Garnet this season. As always, the men celebrate improvement even if the results don’t tell the whole story. Still, there are concrete goals for the next few seasons. “We’ll definitely feel this loss,” Fleischmann said.

On the women’s side, Hannah Rose ’12 finished the highest of the Swarthmore entries, coming in 17th with a time of 24:27.43. Swarthmore finished fifth overall while national No. 2 Johns Hopkins University defended the team title. Haverford sophomore Emily Lipman won with a 22:40.66 finish, defeating Hopkins’ defending champion Laura Paulsen.

“We had to fight our way through the mud,” Rebecca Woo ’11 said, echoing the frustration of her male teammates. Woo added that the race conditions heightened tensions between runners in the pack, recalling that elbow jabs and growls were exchanged during the race.

The Garnet also got a boost from top runner Nyika Corbett ’10, whose involvement in the race was up in the air leading up to Saturday due to a leg injury.

“She’d been nursing a sore hamstring for the past couple of weeks,” said Carroll, “but she’s a plugger.”
Corbett took to the course for the Garnet anyway, coming in in 21st place at 24:41.49.

Lauren DeLuca ’10 and Margret Lenfest ’12 also scored for the Garnet in 27th and 30th places, respectively, in times of 24:52.97 and 25:11.76. Woo finished out the scoring positions for the Garnet in 43rd place (25:37.30).

Next up for both teams is the NCAA Division III Mid-East Regional meet, to be held at Lehigh University in Bethlehem on Nov. 15.

The top two teams at the Regional meet will automatically advance to the NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships, which will be hosted by Baldwin-Wallace College in Cleveland on Nov. 21.

Sixteen additional teams across all eight regions will receive at-large bids. Fifty-six individual runners who are not on a qualifying team will also be invited to the meet. Seven runners will score for each team at the Regionals.

Results from the conference meet will be wiped clean as the top Garnet runners will attempt to qualify out of the region. Start time is listed as 11:00 a.m.

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