The men and women’s cross country teams struggled Saturday at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships hosted by Princeton, with both teams claiming bottom-table finishes. The women’s squad placed seventh out of eight schools with a score of 174, while the men came in last with a score of 253.
Dartmouth won the women’s race with 38 points and was led by Abbey D’Agostino, who took first place with an impressive 40-second lead over the second-place finisher. Columbia took home the men’s gold with 48 points, placing three of its runners in the top five.
“As a team, we definitely did not have a perfect day,” said Heidi Caldwell ’14. “But I think everyone went out there and did the best they could under the circumstances.”
Caldwell was the Bears’ highest-placed runner, finishing 11th at 20 minutes, 59 seconds. Leah Eickhoff ’15 was the next Bruno runner to finish the race, completing 6 kilometers in 21:41 to secure 29th place.
This weekend was Caldwell’s fourth and last time running the Ivy meet. “I just wanted to go out there and give everything I could one more time,” she said. “There’s something really special about the Ivy League meet that no other meet really has.”
Bruno placed two runners in the top 50 of the men’s 8-kilometer race. Mark McGurrin ’15 placed 46th with a time of 24:50, and Colin Savage ’14 finished 48th with a time of 25:03.
The men’s team not only finished last but was also more than 50 points behind seventh-place Cornell, which scored 181.
“There’s not a lot of positive things to take away,” said Director of Track and Field/Cross Country Tim Springfield.
“It was obviously kind of a disappointment. That’s not where we wanted to be,” Savage said.
But Savage noted some positives outcomes from the meet. “We did have some of the underclassmen step up,” he said. “It wasn’t a complete disaster.”
Caldwell said the team has “a lot of potential.”
“A lot of our team doesn’t have that much experience yet in big races,” Caldwell said. “This season was really the growing season to help people gain that experience.”
The next race for the Bears will be in two weeks, when they travel to the Bronx for the NCAA Northeast Regional. The competition will be a much larger meet with more than 30 schools competing.
Teamwork will be one of the main focuses in upcoming weeks, Eickhoff said. “It’s really good to have a pack of runners who are running with you rather than doing it alone,” she said.
“We have two weeks to fine tune some things and be better prepared than we were this past weekend,” Caldwell said.
Last year neither team qualified for nationals — the men’s team finished 11th and the women’s eighth. If the Bears have a similar race this time around, it will be the last of the season.
Springfield said an important part of the next two weeks will be “mostly motivating (the team) to get back out and demonstrate that we can perform a lot better.”
“I’m confident in our team’s ability to go regionals and do well there,” Savage said.
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