USTFCCCA News & Notes
MEET PREVIEW: BIG EAST Championships & Heptagonal Championships
NEW ORLEANS — Van Cortland Park and the West Windsor Fields will be busy this weekend as hundreds of runners from the BIG EAST and Ivy League will traverse their grounds.
It all starts Friday in the Bronx as the BIG EAST settles the score and continues the next day when the legendary Heptagonal Championships are held in Princeton, New Jersey.
Big East Conference
The theme of Friday’s BIG EAST Championships at Van Cortland Park? Changing or establishing the narrative of the 2016 season. That storyline runs through both genders’ races this weekend, starting in the women’s race at 11 am ET and continuing into the men’s race at 11:50 am ET.
The No. 4 Providence women are the top-ranked team in the field and the defending conference champs, but they have questions of their own to answer after falling from the No. 1 spot in the national poll after a third-place finish at Wisconsin.
The Friars, who are looking to become the first back-to-back BE champ since Villanova in 2011, performed well enough as one of just three teams in the field with four runners in the top-40 at Wisconsin. Leader Sarah Collins has yet to assert herself as the runner who has twice finished top-10 at NCAAs, though, and the Friars’ once-intimidating front-running trio is looking less frightful of late.
Beyond Collins, All-American Catarina Rocha seems likely to redshirt this season and All-American Wake Forest transfer Samantha Jones seems a ways from pushing the pace up front (38th in open race at Wisconsin).
Meanwhile, No. 22 Villanova will look to improve on its 12th-place finish at Wisconsin behind frontrunners of its own in Angel Piccirillo and Siofra Cleirigh Buttner. The Wildcats started the season outside the national top-30.
If recent trends continue, it should be Georgetown’s turn to win the conference title. The Hoyas and Friars have alternated titles for the past four years. But the vote-receiving Hoyas don’t appear to be in position to make a run at this juncture, having most recently finished 22nd at Wisconsin with only one top-100 finisher.
Meanwhile, the biggest story in the men’s race will be Patrick Tiernan, the NCAA runner-up in cross country and a 2016 Olympian. Will he debut? If he does, can he become the first man in BIG EAST history to go 4 for 4 when it comes to individual conference titles?
From the team perspective, No. 23 Georgetown enters as the only top-30 team in the field. The Hoyas were 14th at Wisconsin behind a top-15 showing from Scott Carpenter, but All-American Notre Dame transfer Michael Clevenger was 106th and top-10 NCAA finisher Jonathan Green didn’t compete.
Providence, meanwhile, is looking to bounce back from a 19th-place effort at Wisconsin to win its first conference title since 2006. The Friars were led by top-50 finisher Hugh Armstrong.
Ivy League
The best women’s teams in the Ivy League often squared off at the biggest meets around the nation, in turn giving the public a preview of the iconic Heptagonal Championships.
Such was the case at the Paul Short Run in early October and the stacked Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational two weeks ago. The former featured Penn and Yale, while the latter saw Harvard thrown into the mix.
It didn’t matter whether those teams were running in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin: Yale came out on top each time. The Bulldogs were the surprise victor at the Paul Short Run — knocking off Georgetown — and a few weeks later, they finished 11th at Wisco, 19 points clear of Penn (14th) and 22 ahead of Harvard (15th).
Yale, now 21st in the nation, has done an incredible job of pack running at these larger meets. The Bulldogs went 5-8-13 and 31-35-42 at the Paul Short Run and then 62-73-75 in Wisconsin after Emily Waligurski finished 41st overall.
Penn, the 24th-ranked team in the nation, had the top finisher out of any Ivy League team at Paul Short and Wisco. That was Ashley Montgomery (2nd/13th), who should be considered an individual title contender this weekend. Depth issues hampered the Quakers in Wisconsin as their next four runners behind Montgomery finished 49-94-98-100.
Harvard is the last Ivy League team ranked in the most recent poll (26th) and is led by individual title favorite Courtney Smith. The junior has run quite well this season so far, winning the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Meet, taking fourth at the UW Invitational and then placing sixth in Wisconsin.
It should be noted that RV Brown and RV Cornell both ran against Penn and Yale at the Paul Short Run. Both lost contact with the pack, though, and finished 8th and 11th.
In the men’s race, Columbia will try to repeat as team champ with Penn hot on its heels.
There will be a new individual champ as Thomas Awad graduated. To wit: The top-4 finishers all graduated, leaving Yale’s James Randon as the top returner. He finished 4th last year and had a great season on the track where he broke four minutes in the indoor mile and was a First-Team All-America selection in the outdoor 1500.
The women’s race gets underway first at 11 a.m. ET with the men’s race to follow an hour later.