After cheering on their teammates at Duke's first race of the season, the Blue Devils' top returning runners will finally get their first chance to compete.
The returning members of Duke's team from the 2012 NCAA Championship will open their season Saturday, leading the entire Blue Devils force to the Furman Cross Country Classic in Greenville, S.C.
With Furman allowing unlimited collegiate entries, head coach Norm Ogilvie will send as many as 16 runners. The results of this race will begin to determine the team's lineup for later meets in the season, with the 10 fastest athletes moving on to represent Duke at the Virginia Panorama Farms Invitational Sept. 28.
“It’s the only meet all year that does that,” Ogilvie said in reference to the entry policy. “It’s one of the reasons we’re going. We’ll just load up a bus and bring the whole team down there. Everybody will get a shot to run, but there will be future spots on the line.”
Duke will race 8,000 meters at the Furman Golf Course against universities from the surrounding North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia area, including Clemson, ranked 15th in the Southeast region, and Georgia Tech, ranked fourth in the South region. Georgia, the third-ranked team in the South region, will pose the biggest challenge to the Blue Devils. The Bulldogs return seniors Brandon Lord and Lucas Baker, who finished 107th and 120th, respectively, at last year's NCAA Championship, both ahead of Duke’s top finisher, now-senior Brian Atkinson in 129th.
The Blue Devils begin this season fourth in the Southeast region and 28th in the national poll by the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association, entering this meet as the highest-ranked team.
The Bull City Classic two weeks ago served as a low-pressure competition for the team's freshmen, including Stephen Shine, who won the race. But these new athletes will now be running with Duke’s returning top scorers for a limited number of spots later in the season.
“In Division I cross country, it’s very rare for a freshman to break in and contribute,” Ogilvie said. “They have to get the mileage base behind them and get used to the longer distances than high school.”
This race is important for the sophomores who hope to enter into scoring positions, coming off a year of training to build up their mileage base for competition at the collegiate level. This is especially true for William Hague and William Rooney, who finished second and third at the Bull City Classic, respectively.
“They have developed a lot,” Atkinson said. “They got beat up last year. They were adapting. This year they’ve gotten over that adaptation period of being tired a lot, and they look really good and more under control than last year when they were just trying to hang on. I’d expect them to be performing pretty well this year.”
The more experienced members of the team are ready to capitalize on their hard work in the preseason with the race this weekend, hungry to compete with the goal of a return to the NCAA Championships always in mind.
“It’s a daily battle to keep these guys in check,” Ogilvie said. “It’s tough. They ask, ‘Can I run eight miles instead of 10, 13 miles instead of 10?’ A lot of times you have to say no. These guys are all very driven, not that the average Duke student isn’t type-A and compulsive, but these guys take it to another level.”
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