Finishing in the top 10 of a field of 103 runners is pretty good. So when a team has two runners do so well, that's even better, right?
It may be pretty good, but great individual performances do not always enough to secure a high team placing, as women's cross country learned Oct. 26.
The Tigers placed sixth out of nine teams at the Heptagonal championships. This was an improvement over last year's seventh-place finish, but fell short of the team's goal of cracking the top three.
Princeton was led by sophomore Emily Kroshus, whose fifth place finish (17 minutes, 51.3 seconds) earned her a spot on the All-Ivy team. In what has become a pattern this year, senior Catherine Casey finished on Kroshus's heels, coming in ninth at 17:58 and earning second-team All-Ivy honors.
The rest of the Tigers' top five — senior Emily Eynon, sophomore Rebecca Snyder and senior Holly Huffman — finished 27th, 38th, and 50th, respectively.
In contrast, Brown had no runners in the top 10, but with four runners in the top 25 they took fifth place — ahead of the Tigers.
Some of the team's troubles can be traced to the specifics of the course, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, N.Y.
One problem is the tendency to run the first mile too quickly. The course starts out flat, but setting too fast of a pace at the beginning can catch up to runners once they reach the back hills around the two-mile mark.
Additionally, in a field of over 100 runners, it's easy to get stuck behind other competitors.
Princeton runners ran into both of these problems at Heps.
"There were a couple of technical errors," head coach Peter Farrell said. "One went out too hard and one [Eynon] went out too slow. Getting out too slow blocked her from getting higher than she finished."
"I've never run that fast on that course, so it wasn't a bad race per se," Eynon said. "I just think had I been able to get around people more easily earlier on it would've made a big difference in the finish."
Considered in context, it wasn't such a bad race for the team either. Yale, Cornell and Columbia — the first, second and third place finishers — have all been ranked in the national top 25 this season.
"We could've been anywhere from third to sixth," Farrell said. "We unfortunately finished at the low end of the prediction.
"It's the best average we've had for five athletes in a long time. We had two break 18 minutes, one at 18:35 (Eynon), one at 18:49 (Snyder), and one had a bad day (Huffman). That's normally top three, but not this year.
"All in all it was a somewhat disappointing finish."
Despite their disappointment, the team must now focus on NCAA Regionals, scheduled for this Saturday at Lehigh.
"I hope that we can all get it together next Saturday and go out there and prove that we're one of the top teams in the nation, and we deserve to go to Nationals," Eynon said.
"Catherine and Emily have a good shot at going individually, and hopefully the rest of us can join them."
If the rest of the team can catch up to Casey and Kroshus, Eynon may get her wish.
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