"The team finished 18th [out of 35] and pretty much ran a terrible race," senior captain Wes Stockard said of the performance of men's cross country this weekend at the NCAA Pre-National Invitational at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
That basically sums it up.
First place in the Invitational went to Stanford, with a total score of 56. Princeton finished 390 points later with a grand total of 446.
Of 223 runners, Stockard finished 40th with a time of 25 minutes, 28 seconds. Second for Princeton was junior Jon Bell in 47th place with a time of 25:35. Sophomore Ryan Teising placed 105th (26:24), followed by freshman Austin Smith in 113th (26:29) and sophomore Pete Cioni in 141st (26:47).
The race was especially disappointing because the Tigers again did not achieve their goal of beating Dartmouth, their traditional rival in the Heptagonal League — the Big Green placed 13th with 347 points.
At the Iona Invitational at the end of September, Princeton fell short of Dartmouth by a mere 12 points, an indication that Princeton has a better chance than some would have predicted of defeating the Big Green in the Heptagonal championships. This race's margin of defeat — 99 points — is a bit disturbing.
"As a team I was very disappointed in our results," head coach Mike Brady said. "I just did not feel that the athletes we had in South Carolina ran to the best of their ability."
So what went wrong?
The Tigers had a strong start to the year with that second place finish to Dartmouth, but this week's showing leaves them considerably less optimistic.
For one thing, two top runners — junior Josh Ordway and sophomore Jeff Di Chiara — did not finish the race. Ordway ran into problems with heat exhaustion, and Di Chiara pulled up with a sprained hamstring.
A second glitch was that the Tigers were too spread out along the course. Stockard and Bell made an attempt early on to run with the team in order to bring it up to speed. But the hilly course posed an unexpected challenge to the trailing Tigers, and the lead pair finished ahead of the rest by over 60 places.
"Obviously we did not execute our pack strategy very well," Stockard said, "Bell and I ran together but should have gotten out faster, and we had hoped that the other guys would step up more."
The result of Saturday's race leaves the Tigers at a pivotal point. "We can either pick ourselves up and make this a championship season, or we can lose our confidence and remain the team that could have been," Stockard said.
As Brady put it: "We are at that time of the year where would have, could have and should have are not options which are going to help us.
"The guys who are healthy and racing for us need to look at this situation and embrace the opportunity to step up and make their presence felt. If guys look to someone else to shoulder the load for this team to be successful in the Heptagonal championships or at the NCAA District meet then we will have a long championship season."
On the bright side, the race exposed to the team its weaknesses — weaknesses the Tigers have two weeks to get rid of before the Heptagonal championships.
Heps promises to be a more controlled race than Saturday's race, which included a huge field of teams from across the country, from Stanford to the University of South Florida. The smaller field at Heps will give the Tigers a chance to work their way back to the top.
"I have every confidence that they will be ready to race in the league championship," Brady said.
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