Impressive Performance
October 17, 2008 03:43 PM | General
October 17, 2008
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| Keri Bland |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Imagine Florida going to Georgia without quarterback Tim Tebow and blowing out the Bulldogs on their home field. Well, that’s what the No. 7-rated West Virginia cross country team did today without No. 1 runner Marie-Louise Asselin when the Mountaineers easily won the Penn State National Open in State College.
The Mountaineers breezed past No. 20 Penn State, No. 25 Wake Forest, No. 28 Duke and Tennessee to claim their second meet victory of the season.
Two weeks ago, West Virginia beat 43 teams at the Paul Short Invitational in Bethlehem, Pa.
Today’s result is perhaps even more remarkable considering West Virginia coach Sean Cleary chose to leave his top runner home to take a chemistry test.
“Marie is healthy she just had an extremely difficult academic week and to be totally honest I wanted to see what we were like without her,” Cleary said.
The coach got his answer.
Keri Bland finished second overall with a time of 20:11 and Clara Grandt ran what Cleary called “the best race of her life” to place third with a time of 20:17.
Morgantown’s Ahna Lewis was eighth with a time of 20:56 and Kaylyn Christopher crossed the line in ninth place with a time of 20:59. The Mountaineers easily topped second-place Penn State by 43 points.
“Once we didn’t run Marie-Louise some of these teams thought that they had a realistic shot at winning today,” Cleary said. “Fortunately we put together a great day.”
The vast majority of top teams chose to run in this weekend’s Pre-Nationals in Terre Haute, Ind. Villanova opted to run its B-team today at Penn State and Georgetown pulled out of the race altogether.
“Seventy five percent of the Top 50 schools are in Indiana this weekend,” Cleary said. “It’s a shame that we have to go to one location in the middle of the season to run such a monster race when we’ve got these phenomenal invitationals all over the country that are losing their meets. Whether or not we’re a great team or a good team, we’ll always come back here.”
The Penn State Open gave Cleary an opportunity to tweak his lineup and give other runners an opportunity to score.
“The depth is remarkable and I wanted to see today the pack of girls in the four-five-six-seven roles how they would respond in a meet like this where we just didn’t need two of them to step - we actually needed three of them to step up,” Cleary explained. “It’s imperative that these girls run well at the big meets we have coming up at the end of the year and I was pleased with the way they performed today.
“Even the girls in the eight, nine, 10 and 11 spots fighting to run at Big Easts, they just had great performances today,” Cleary said.
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| Kaylyn Christopher |
The coach singled out Christopher’s Top 10 finish today as most encouraging.
“Kayln’s performance to me was the most impressive,” he said. “I have never doubted what she could do but today she actually did it. Kayln probably took a minute off of her top time from a year ago.”
Cleary admits today’s first-place finish even exceeded his high expectations.
“It’s fun right now. I thought we could come in and squeak out a win if we really, really hit it,” Cleary said.
As for his top runner, Cleary won’t be keeping Marie-Louise Asselin out of any more races. She is well rested and ready to go for the remainder of the year.
“She ran a tremendous race a few weeks ago and she’s going to have to run it five more times the rest of the year and I think it’s just going to increase our odds of seeing this team stay together the entire way,” he said. “She had 180 days between NCAA indoors and Lehigh so I’m not worried at all that she was not in a competitive frame of mind today.”
Naturally, the first text message waiting on Cleary’s phone wanting to know how the team did was from Asselin.
“She wanted to run because she didn’t want the team to lose this race because she stayed home,” Cleary said. “She was the first person to text me wanting to know how we did.”
Even Marie-Louie was probably a little surprised with the result.
