Junior Sally Meyerhoff has quietly been the second-best runner on the women's cross country team all season long. Although consistently placing at the top of the leaderboard, Meyerhoff ran in the shadows of teammate Shannon Rowbury-until this weekend. Meyerhoff raced to an ACC individual title and led the No. 5 Blue Devils to their first ever ACC Championship Saturday in Maryland.
Junior Sally Meyerhoff has quietly been the second-best runner on the women’s cross country team all season long. Although consistently placing at the top of the leaderboard, Meyerhoff ran in the shadows of teammate Shannon Rowbury—until this weekend. Meyerhoff raced to an ACC individual title and led the No. 5 Blue Devils to their first ever ACC Championship Saturday in Maryland.
“This is a pretty monumental event for our program,” head coach Kevin Jermyn said. “I was surprised at the strength of the victory this weekend. We scored quite a few points lower than expected.”
Duke had never placed higher than fourth in the ACC Championships before Saturday but broke though in a bold way. The Blue Devils almost doubled up their nearest competitor, No. 7 North Carolina, and also dominated two other top-25 teams, No. 10 N.C. State and No. 18 Wake Forest.
“We’ve never gone into a race with expectations this big,” Jermyn said. “We went into the race nervous, but came out with a big win and a lot of confidence. It was a real monkey-off-the-back experience.”
The Blue Devils controlled the race from the outset, with their five runners in the top 10 positions at the half-mile mark. Meyerhoff and Rowbury took the lead, and Rowbury set an aggressive pace for the majority of the 6-kilometer run.
With about a half mile left, Meyerhoff took the lead and cruised to a first-place finish with a time of 21:34.2, 12 seconds ahead of the nearest competitor. Tar Heels Carol Henry and Erin Donohue edged out Rowbury on a long steep hill with about a quarter mile remaining, and Rowbury finished fourth, only a second behind Donohue.
“Their focus was on placing as low as possible for the team to win,” Jermyn said of Meyerhoff and Rowbury.
The rest of the Blue Devils’ scorers maintained their top-10 positions from the quick start. All five finished in the top 10, with Natasha Roetter earning a sixth-place finish, Tiare Ferguson placing eighth and Phoebe Ko finishing 10th.
All five earned All-ACC and Ferguson also garnered ACC Freshman of the Year. The Blue Devils were so strong that had they competed against the top five finishers from the rest of the ACC, they would have lost by just a few points.
“Our top six ran the best races of the year as a team,” Jermyn said. “The team was pretty inexperienced in terms of winning, and they put it all out there on the course.”
The victory relieves the pressure to win the upcoming NCAA Regional meet. The Blue Devils will again face off against N.C. State, North Carolina and Wake Forest among others at the regional meet, vying for one of the two automatic bids. But Jermyn said he believes even if the team does not place in the top two at regionals it will still likely receive an at-large bid to the NCAA National meet in late November.
“Our goal for right now is to just qualify for nationals,” Jermyn said. “I believe we can run with any team in the country.”
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