Harvard Runners Look for Top Three Finishes at Heptagonal Championships
Photo of men's team huddle courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications.
Storyline
The men’s and women’s cross country teams travel to Van
Cortlandt Park in New York City for the 2009 Heptagonal Cross
Country Championships Friday.
The women will be up first, with their 5,000-meter race starting at
11:15 a.m., while the men's 5-mile race is slated to begin an hour
later at 12:15 p.m. The awards ceremony is scheduled to take place
at 1:00 pm.
Heps History
Friday’s race will be the 79th Heptagonal Championship on the
men’s side and 33rd for the women. Sixty-one of the last 62
championships have been held at Van Cortlandt Park.
Men’s Preview
Harvard returns four of its five scorers from last year’s
sixth-place finish and is the only team to return two Heps top-10
finishers from last year in senior Chas Gillespie and junior Daniel
Chenoweth. Gillespie will make his 2009 debut at Van Cortlandt
Park, while Chenoweth has seen success early on, winning the annual
dual meet with Yale by 24 seconds in 24:20, a personal best at
Franklin Park and finishing eighth with a personal-best 8K time of
24:01.8 in the blue race at NCAA Pre-Nationals in Terre Haute, Ind.
Freshmen Jeremy Gilmour and Sean Pohorence and junior Ryan Neely
have been among the Crimson top five in two meets this fall.
Women’s Preview
The Crimson is the only team, male or female, to return all five
Heps scorers from a season ago. Last year, the Crimson finished
fifth to match its 2007 finish, which was its best showing since
1999. Harvard is coming off a 12th-place finish at the
Pre-Nationals Invitational where three runners finished in the top
50. Junior Claire Richardson, who finished fourth in this race last
fall, led the Crimson with a personal best and 31st place finish.
Richardson also won the Harvard-Yale dual meet last month.
Sophomore Kailyn Kuzmuk was 33rd at Pre-Nationals and freshman
Sammy Silva, who won the Iona Meet of Champions last month, was
49th overall in Terre Haute, Ind. Sophomores Nicole Cochran and
Jeanne Macke and juniors Jamie Olson and Eliza Ives have been among
the Crimson’s top scorers this fall.
In the National Spotlight
The Harvard women received votes in last week’s U.S. Track
and Field/Cross Country Coaches Association top 30 poll. It’s
the first time since Oct. 30, 1995 the Crimson has picked up votes
in the poll.
Regional Rankings
The conference championships will be no easy battle as all eight
men’s programs and seven women’s programs are ranked in
the top 12 of their respective regions. Despite only competing
twice thus far, both the Harvard men’s and women’s
squads rank among the top eight in the Northeast Region. The women
are third and the men are eighth in the latest USTFCCCA rankings.
On the men’s side, Columbia is fourth, Dartmouth is fifth,
Cornell is sixth, Brown is seventh and Yale is 11th in the
Northeast, while Princeton is third and Penn is 10th in the
Mid-Atlantic rankings. For the women, Cornell at fourth, Brown is
seventh, Columbia is eighth and Dartmouth is 10th, while Princeton
is third and Penn is eighth in the Mid-Atlantic rankings.
On the Horizon
Harvard stays close to home for the NCAA Northeast Regional Nov.
14. The NCAA Championship qualifying meet will be held at Franklin
Park in Boston. The men’s race will begin at 2:30 p.m. with
the women’s starting at 3:30 p.m.
