Staying in the Crowd Spells Success for CU

Although the loss of many runners seems a daunting obstacle to overcome, both the men’s and women’s cross country teams are optimistic that they will stay ahead of the competition this season.

Last year, the Lions placed second at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships, behind only Princeton. Columbia also stood out in the NCAA Northeast Regionals, where the women placed fourth and the men placed fifth.

Columbia must now begin to assess the impact of last season’s losses. The men’s team has lost eight of its top 12 runners from 2006, and the women have lost two of their top four.

Head coach Willy Wood, however, has been very active in replacing those losses. Wood, who has coached cross country at Columbia since 1994, said freshman Jackie Drouin has had an “immediate impact” on the women’s team. On the men’s side, Wood has added seven new runners, who will be looked upon to help keep the Lions near the top of the Ancient Eight.

Senior Carmen Ballard, last year’s top women’s runner and one of this season’s captains, notes that while the team is relatively young, the players have an aura of optimism about them. “We are going into it [the season] with a renewed sense of the ability to achieve,” she said.

The team is also very close-knit, saying that they share a bond not found in many other sports. “They’re your boys,” senior captain Liam Boylan-Pett said. “You spend most of your time with them.”

Boylan-Pett also noted that the team had effectively reloaded the slots left by last year’s seniors. “Our team is pretty deep. We only need two more to really step up.”
Joining Ballard and Boylan-Pett as 2007 captains are Shelby Leland, Stephanie Lenihan, and Zach Richard.

If the season-opening meet at Binghamton was any indication, then this season should be a success for Columbia. Both teams dominated the Binghamton Invitational, with the men taking the first 10 individual spots. This past weekend, the women won the Ram Invitational hosted by Fordham University, while the men placed second, despite resting many runners.

Furthermore, the first polls of the season place Columbia strongly in contention. The women and men are ranked third and fourth, respectively, in the Northeast region in the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association poll. “Right now, our combined program is generally considered the best in the Ivy League,” Wood said.

Although the season is very young, the runners have shown a great deal of discipline in their training, learning Wood’s hallmark pack style. The Binghamton meet was used as a training run, and the first 11 male finishers, all from Columbia, finished within a second of one another.

The times came out as hoped for by Wood, with the returning runners pacing the first half of the race and the freshmen leading the pack for the latter half. The first two meets have been used as a yardstick to measure the progress of the team thus far rather than as full-strength races.

“We are in the early stages of training,” Wood added, “but I couldn’t be more pleased with our progress so far.”

Both teams will next compete in the Paul Short Invitational on Sept. 28th.