The Blue Devils showcased their hard summer training in a friendly competition against local schools Wednesday. The men’s team beat competitors Wake Forest and High Point, while the women’s team placed second in the three team competition, losing to Wake Forest.
The format of the meet was different from usual—the race was run in pairs, in which each athlete ran two segments of a four-leg course. Each school could only enter three pairs, whose combined times constituted the total team score.
Racing on the same course as last year’s disappointing ACC Championship performance, the men’s team sought to start the season right. The Blue Devils finished with the three fastest individual times, based on relay split times, and beat Wake Forest by more than a minute overall, 2:16:08 to 2:17:28.
“This was a psychological meet [for our runners],” men’s head coach Norm Ogilvie said. “We wanted to turn things around and start the season off with a win.”
The top Duke pairing and top finishers were senior Mike Hatch and freshman Chris Spooner, who clocked in with a combined time of 44:50. Only four seconds behind were sophomore Keith Krieger and senior Nick Schneider. Schneider had the fastest individual time in the meet.
Schneider and Hatch ran neck-and-neck in each of their 3.7-kilometer segments of the race, working together to push each other. Although Schneider had a faster overall time by 12 seconds, he was outrun on the second leg by Hatch. The two ran relatively evenly timed splits, but the pair did not feel pressure from their lagging competition.
The sophomore tandem of Dan Daily and John Fox rounded out the six scoring Duke runners.
“We absolutely trained through this meet, ran the meet tired, and performed well,” Ogilvie said.
The women’s team had a very different approach to the meet, not registering its top runners in order to leave open the option of redshirting in the case of an injury. Because of the relaxed nature of this meet, many of the Duke runners competed as individuals. The combined times of the top runners, however, would have easily earned a first place finish.
The first Duke-registered team to cross the tape was junior Laura Stanley and sophomore Elle Pishny, who finished with a time of 35:28.
Women’s head coach Kevin Jermyn used this meet to gauge how the team compared to its close competitors, and concluded that, at this point in the season, it was running at a higher level and is deeper than its rivals.
Treating the meet as a low-key training exercise, the women’s team was not focused on the team score but instead on individual development.
Running as individuals, Duke’s Shannon Rowbury and Liz Wort clocked the top time for runners on the Blue Devils’ roster. The duo missed a first-place finish by five seconds, but Rowbury posted the top women’s time at the meet. Rowbury, who in the past had focused more on track, ran the 2.55-kilometer segments in 8:12 and 8:19, beating Wake Forest’s star Anne Bersagel, an All-American last year.
“Shannon had a late start to summer practice, but she is training with more intensity,” Jermyn said. “She is in the best cross country shape she has been in her whole college career.”
Duke’s first real test will come at the Georgetown invitational Sept. 11, where both the men’s and women’s teams will face top-10 competition.
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