7th Great American
Cross Country Festival

September 24, 2005 - Cary, NC

Managed by NSSF - Presented by Nike


Worth the trip

Episcopal FL girls, Chapel Hill NC boys overcome obstacles to come through at Great American - now they are hoping to represent the Southeast in Portland in December

By Ben Ackerly
NTN Southeast Regional Editor

CARY , NC , Sept. 24 – The girls of Episcopal FL and the boys of Chapel Hill NC took very different routes to the Great American Cross Country Festival in North Carolina on Saturday. Both left a lot closer to a late-fall weekend on the other coast (Nike Team Nationals in Portland).

One team traveled hundreds of miles to get here, then toed the line while its best runner had to stand and watch. The other had a drive that took just minutes, but it traveled with more questions than answers, and it nearly never made the trip at all. Neither team won at Great American – Saratogo Springs NY took care of that. And neither team was really in top form. But by leading the way for the Southeast Region in the region’s biggest event of the fall, Episcopal, runner-up in the Girls Nike Race of Champions, and Chapel Hill, which finished third among the boys, surely put themselves in prime position in the race to get to Portland, Oregon, on December 3 by moving up in the Southeast regional rankings. (The top two teams from each region are invited to NTN in Portland.).

Episcopal, which entered Great American ranked No. 3 in the Southeast Region behind Scottsboro AL and Mountain Brook AL, was coming off a pair of dominating wins in Florida and seemed poised to break out on a bigger stage. Then 24 hours before the big race the team was told that, due to a hip injury, #1 Emily Ingham would not be available to compete.

“That was a little shocking,” said sophomore Maggie Traylor, who ran #2 for Episcopal on Saturday. Added sophomore Laura Steel, the new #1, “We were worried.”

As was Coach Michelle Krueger. “I had to be realistic,” she said of a team that, with the loss of Ingham, a junior, consisted of a junior, two sophomores, a freshman and two 8 th-graders. “I just wanted them to get the experience.”

So Krueger told the girls as they departed from Jacksonville, on the eve of their first go in the Nike Race of Champions: “I just said, ‘Okay, you girls are going to have to step up.’”

And step up they did. Steel set the pace – “Laura really took over the lead in place of Emily,” Traylor said – coming home 19 th overall at 19:00.7. Traylor was next, 45 th at 19:38.6, followed closely by her younger sister Katie, an 8 th-grader who finished 46 th at 19:43.5. Eighth-grader Leslie Blackshear was the fourth Episcopal runner to break 20:00, finishing 59 th at 19:55.8. Freshman Brooke Hardington rounded out the top 5, finishing 100 th at 20:32.5, and junior Hadley Ferguson crossed the line in 105 th place at 20:37.6.

US#1 Saratoga Springs, the defending national champion, was the easy winner, with all five runners in the chute before the Episcopal #2, but when the scores were tabulated, there stood Episcopal in second – if barely – ahead of NE#7 Jackson NJ, 2004 NTN Finalist Bethlehem Central NY, SE#6 Brentsville VA, SE#7 Oakton VA, SE#2 Mountain Brook AL, SE#9 Collins Hill GA, SW#9 Fairview CO, SE#5 Midlothian VA, 2004 NTN Finalist Park City UT, SE#4 Cardinal Gibbons and a slew of other regional powers.

“I can’t believe it – I can’t believe it,” a disbelieving Krueger said as she reviewed the results, her giddy group of young runners bouncing around in celebration nearby.

“They are just overjoyed. This is incredible.”

And particularly so for a team few would have picked to thrive on the challenging 5K course at SAS Soccer Park in Cary. Footing was rocky and uneven and often sandy as well, and the rolling layout featured a deceptively steep, roughly quarter-mile incline that runners had to navigate twice – once early in the second mile and again near the end of the third.

“This was so much harder than anything we’ve done,” said Steel. “We’re Florida girls; we’re not hill people.”

But, Steel added, and with her teammates proved, “We’re tougher than people think.”

Krueger was just as impressed by the composure of her young charges. “They seemed really calm” just before the start of the race, she said. “I think they knew they just needed to give it their best shot.”

Southeast Boys

For the SE#4 Chapel Hill boys, the mission was much the same – “We just wanted to leave everything out on the course,” said team leader Jack Bolas – but it was one the Tigers almost passed up. Well beyond the normal mid-August entry deadline for Great American, the team was still expecting to compete at the Greensboro (NC) Invitational instead.

“We had never planned to come to this meet,” Bolas said.

A season-opening win at the Western North Carolina Carnival in late August, and the sudden awareness that a chance to run in Portland was not out of reach, led to a change of heart and a last-minute call to the coach. “We said, ‘We should be at that race,’” said Bolas.

Not that it took much to persuade Coach Ron Olsen, who had prepared for just such a contingency by pre-registering his team earlier, pending payment. “I was ready with the credit card,” Olsen quipped. Still, he added, “It was all them – they had to be the ones who wanted to do it.”

Do what exactly became less clear after Bolas suffered a bizarre knee injury, slamming his knee into a No Parking sign while out for an easy run, and lost almost two weeks of training in the lead-up to Saturday’s race. That and some uneven performances by the team’s relatively inexperienced 4 and 5 runners, a widely discussed vulnerability, had Olsen scratching his head a few hours before the gun. “I have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said.

Olsen’s advice to the team: “I said, ‘This was your idea to some here. You darn well better make something of it.’”

Bolas, running free and easy, and senior classmates Ryan Workman and Duncan Hoge bided their time through the first mile, then starting picking people off. “We knew we had wait, and then work that first hill,” Bolas said. By the time they hit the hill again it was clear they’d done their part, with Bolas coming home 3rd overall at 15:20.1, Workman 20 th at 15:56.5 and Hoge 21 st at 15:59.5 – the fastest top three of the day, and a top three that was in the chute before the top two of every team but Saratoga and NE#8 Monsignor Farrell NJ.

Of course, “We know what those three guys are going to do,” said junior Miles Rampel, the team’s No. 4 runner, standing next to classmate and No. 5 runner Taylor Muir. “Our cross country team comes down to us two. It’s up to us to run well.”

No pressure for two runners in a meet of this caliber for the very first time.

“You really feel the nerves come in” at the starting line, said Muir. “You hear all these teams called out – state champion of this, state champion of that…. You just try to remember that you’re with these teams because you’re as good as them.”

Added Rampel, “It’s daunting. We just have to want it so much more than everyone else’s 4 and 5.”

Daunting or not, Rampel, 74 th overall at 16:54.7, and Muir (88 th at 17:05.6) – followed not too far behind by sophomores Jack Marshall (102 nd at 17:17.3) and Peter Anderson (134 th, 17:34.3) – did what they had to do to make the team’s effort pay off: Third-place in the team standings, first from the Southeast.

“This just shows how solid our 4-7 [runners] are,” Bolas said. “These guys came through today. They made the difference.”

Though Olsen was less than completely satisfied – what coach ever is? – he did allow that, “To get this off what we’ve been doing, yeah, that’s fine.”

“It was a good day. I’m glad we came.”

 

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