His coach was confident all along, but at the NCAA outdoor track and field championships, senior Rod Koborsi showed he really is one of the best college distance runners in the nation.
Fourth best, to be exact.
Koborsi ran the 10,000 meters in 28:42.05, putting him three seconds out of third place, but still enough to earn all-American honors. University of Arizona junior Robert Cheseret won the race with a time of 28:20.11.
“It was probably the best performance of [Koborsi’s] life,” said Ron Helmer, director of track and field and cross country.
Later at the championship, teammates junior Chris Lukezic took sixth in the men’s 1,500 meters and freshman Maggie Infeld took 11th in the women’s 1,500 meters.
Koborsi, Lukezic and Infeld were the only Hoyas to qualify for the NCAA national meet, held June 8-11 in Sacramento, Calif.
Lukezic finished with a personal record time of 3:38.58, one one-hundredth of a second behind fifth-place junior Shane Stroup of the University of Florida and just over a second behind race winner freshman Leonel Manzano of the University of Texas. Lukezic’s time was good enough to earn all-American honors and to put him in third in the Georgetown all-time record book, just behind Steve Holman (CAS ’92) and John Gregorek (CAS ’82).
After leading the pack early in the race, Lukezic fell back in the final stretch. Helmer called it “a tactical error.”
Infeld, concluding an outstanding freshman season, ran the women’s 1,500 meters in 4:21.97, good enough for 11th place. The time was a personal record and shows the steady improvement that has characterized Infeld as she bested her NCAA Regionals fourth-place time by six seconds.
Senior Anne Shandle of the University of Nebraska won the race with a time of 4:11.37. Other than Infeld, the only other freshman to advance to the 1,500 meter finals was Heidi Magill of Brigham Young University. Magill finished fifth overall.
“All she did was tell me what I already knew and what she sort of suspected,” Helmer said. “She’s got a great future ahead of her.”
Two weeks later at the USA Championships in Carson, Calif., eight Hoyas competed in the non-NCAA competition, all racing to represent the United States at the World Track and Field Championships in early August in Helsinki, Finland. The top three finalists in each race will continue to Helsinki if they meet the qualifying time.
Lukezic took second in the 1,500 meters with a time of 3:42.06, which Helmer described as “the race where all the big boys get together.” Lukezic finished just behind his occasional training partner, Team Nike’s Alan Webb, who lives in Reston, Va.
It was a tactical race that started out slow and Lukezic learned from his error two weeks earlier, Helmer said. Lukezic will now head to Europe for the next several weeks to try and run the world championship qualifying time of 3:36.00.
Georgetown alumna Treniere Clement (COL ’04), running for Team Nike, won the women’s 1,500 meters with a time of 4:06.73, beating Jen Toomey, the American record holder in the 1,000 meters.
“It’s been a good weekend for Georgetown and D.C.,” Webb told the Washington Post.
Infeld took sixth in the women’s 800 meters with a time of 2:08.99 – a strong finish considering that Infeld focused mostly on long distance events such as the 1,500 meters during the outdoor track season. She was, nonetheless, disappointed with the outcome, Helmer said.
In late March, Helmer said he made the decision that Infeld would run the 800 meters and not the 1,500 meters at the USA Championships. “I promised Maggie that we wouldn’t become a single-event team,” he said. “It was good for her to go into an event in which she wasn’t so comfortable.” He compared Infeld to Clement, saying that as a freshman, Infeld is on the same level that Clement was as a junior.
Koborsi took 12th in the open 5,000-meter finals with a time of 13:49.10, a personal record. Helmer said he could have predicted the less-than-spectacular finish. Koborsi’s previous strong 5,000 meter races, such as at the Mt. SAC Relays in April, have come immediately following 10,000-meter races. This time, it had been two weeks since Koborsi raced the 10,000, back at the NCAA national meet.
Helmer was also impressed by freshman Daniel Nunn’s second place finish in the men’s lunior 5,000 meters. Nunn will represent the United States at the Pan-American Championships in Windsor, Ontario, in late July.
Freshman Michael Banks finished fourth in the junior men’s 1,500-meter finals in what Helmer described as the young athlete’s “best race of the year.” Freshman Brandon Bonsey raced in the junior men’s 1,500-meter preliminaries, but did not continue to the finals.
Shane Young, another freshman, finished eighth in the finals of the 3,000-meter steeple chase.
For the women, freshman Ashley Hubbard raced in the 1,500 meters.
“When you can get so many freshmen racing well at the end of the season, it really is a good sign,” Helmer said.
