Doomed by a slow start, the Blue Devils found themselves racing from behind in one of the most competitive meets of the year.
Traveling to Madison, Wis., Friday for the Wisconsin Adidas Invitational, Duke did battle with 38 of the top teams in the nation—including six teams ranked in the top 10. The Blue Devils looked to fine-tune their racing strategy and notch a confidence-building performance heading into the ACC championship, but overcompensation for past mistakes led Duke to an 858-point, 35th-place finish.
“The girls never put themselves in competition,” head coach Christine Engel said. “They didn’t get out fast enough, and wound up racing the wrong people. We went out very aggressively at Boston two weeks ago and I think the group overcompensated today and went the other extreme.“
With 22 nationally-ranked teams toeing the line Friday, Duke was going to need near-perfect execution to find a way past the field. Each squad at Wisconsin has a legitimate shot of reaching the national championship meet, making it the deepest meet the Blue Devils have raced in all year. The race is an opportunity for teams to notch signature wins that could earn them a ticket to the NCAA meet if they do not make it through their regional. For a team on the edge, the stakes could not be higher.
With a lack-luster performance Friday, Duke’s shot at a championship appearance now depends on the team finishing first or second in the Southeast regional a month from now. Currently ranked seventh in the Southeast, Duke has some improvements to make in order to compete for an automatic bid, but the prospect is there for a team that has yet to run its best race.
“We know what we need to work on,” Engel said. “While there’s definitely disappointment in our performance today, we know that this [performance] was not a true indicator of where we’re really at from a fitness perspective.”
The Blue Devils can look to a strong performance by sophomore Haley Meir as evidence that their team has more to give. The Grosse Point Farms, Mich., native finished fifth for the Blue Devils in the team’s last big race in Boston, but led her team at Wisconsin, outpacing graduate student Jesse Rubin and sophomore standout Wesley Frazier to post a time of 21:39.0.
Duke is benefiting from improvements from individual runners each week, but struggling to piece the individual achievements together into a solid team effort. The Blue Devils have not seen a strong performance by each of their scoring runners on the same day since the Virginia Duals, when Duke dominated conference opponents Virginia and Florida State—teams that finished eighth and ninth in Friday's meet.
The Blue Devils have proven they can go step-for-step with some of the best teams in the country, but earning a championship berth will require all five runners preforming their best on the same day.
“We need to be deliberate in how we handle this and put in some hard work over the two weeks we have before the ACC championship and four weeks we have before regionals,” Engel said. “We definitely have an opportunity to make our adjustments, but we need to make sure that we do make those adjustments.”
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