Women's cross country fourth at Heps

It's tough to win a championship when your competition comes in and blows the entire Ivy League — plus Navy — out of the water.

The Princeton women's cross country team returned from the Heptagonal Championships this past week, where they dueled with eight other schools for the prestige of being crowned champion for the cross country season.

The Tigers entered entertaining the hope that they could pull off the upset and win, since they had recently performed well against most of the other teams with title chances.

It wasn't meant to happen.

Columbia placed five runners in the top ten to crush the competition, and Princeton cruised to fourth place in a closely contested finish with Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth, all of who finished within eight points of the Tigers. Princeton ended the day with 100 points, while winner Columbia had 26.

Yale had 92, good enough for second, and Cornell and Dartmouth had 99 and 107, finishing in third and fifth places, respectively.

"We were really surprised to have lost by one point to Cornell, said junior Becca Snyder. "We actually thought we finished third, and we were disappointed when we found out. However, we were really proud of our performance as a team."

Princeton's top finisher was junior Emily Kroshus, who crossed the finish line at 17 minutes, 36.6 seconds. Kroshus has been the top Princeton finisher in every race in the season, and Heps proved no exception.

Her time for the race gives her the fourth fastest Princeton woman's time at Van Cortland Park, where the meet was held.

Coming in behind Kroshus was juior Laura Petrillo, at 18:11.8, in fifteenth place. Petrillo hit her stride midway through the season, and her performance at Heps caps a strong trend in the last few weeks of being Princeton's number-two runner. Next was junior Becca Snyder, third for the Tigers and twenty-first overall, crossing the finish line in 18:27.8. Both Petrillo and Snyder have made a lot of progress this cross country season, and it should be interesting to see how well they do when the indoor track season begins.

Freshman Cack Ferrell placed fourth for Princeton, coming in at 18:24.4. Both Ferrell and fellow freshman Meredith Lambert have lead an unusually strong frosh contingent in this year's top cadre of runners on the team.

Finishing the Tiger scoring group was sophomore Marian Birhle, who took thity-second place over all with a time of 18:38.6. Birhle has been battling back from anemia since late last year, and her performance at Heps seems to show that she's firmly back on track.

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The Princeton women continued their tradition this season of finishing in a pack. The twelfth-place runner on the team finished in 19:14, only a half-minute or so behind the fifth-place runner.

"[It] just demonstrates the depth on our team," Snyder said. "We've improved dramatically [since the beginning of the season], and on Friday we showed that we can run with that level of competition."

Columbia, the meet's winner, finished sixth overall at Pre-Nationals, so the Tigers knew they had their work cut out for them. However, they went into the meet prepared.

"One thing [our coach] always tells us is that we never go into a race thinking we are second best," said Snyder. "So we went into the race thinking that on any given day, any team could win. However, we did know that Columbia finished 6th at Pre-Nationals, and we finished 17th, so it would be a challenge to defeat them. We were really eager to beat Yale, and as the scores showed, only 8 points separated the second, third, and fourth place teams."

Much of Yale's eventual edging out of the Tigers must be attributed to the O'Neill twins, who finished first and second for the Bulldogs. Yet despite such an edge, the Tigers still very nearly beat them.

Though a fourth-place finish may not have been exactly what Princeton was looking for going into Heps, many of the individual performances involved were exciting to see, and bode well for next year.