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Runners (from left) Ayalew Taye, Justin Scheid, Levi Miller and Mike Krisch.
BRONX, N.Y., Oct. 31 -Andrew Bumbalough was all smiles as he surged down the final 200 meters, sensing that he was soon to be the Big East individual champion. As the red-shirt junior crossed the finish line in 23:55, he dropped his hands to his knees and tried to catch his breath, having just run the second-fastest time in course history. Yet standing and turning around, his smile grew even bigger as five of his teammates paraded into the chute behind him, good for seventh through 11th place to cement Georgetown’s first Big East team championship since 2003.
While this year’s squad became the first since 1989 to capture both the individual and team crowns for the Big East, the races for each could not have been more different. For Bumbalough, from the start it was a one-on-one battle with Notre Dame senior Patrick Smyth, a top-15 finisher at Nationals the year before and the reigning Big East 10K champion in the outdoor season.
With Smyth leading nearly the entirety of the race, Van Cortlandt Park’s hilly course made it tough for Bumbalough, nursing a tender hamstring, to keep it close. Only a year ago, Bumbalough pushed too hard on a downhill and strained his hamstring during the Big East race.
Smyth used the terrain to his advantage, taking the downhills extremely hard and forcing Bumbalough to make up ground on the uphills and flat portions of the course. Yet Smyth could not shake Bumbalough as he pulled even with about 600 meters to go, poised to make a move. Down the final straightaway, Bumbalough asserted the pace, slowly inching ahead, until he took off from a little over 200 meters out, erasing any doubt.
“With probably about 400 to go, I had about five meters on him, and I kind of heard him coming back up again, and then with 200 to go, I really took off and tried to put a nail in the coffin, so to speak, and kind of ended there,” Bumbalough said.
In terms of the team race, Georgetown dominated from start to finish, with redshirt junior Levi Miller leading the front-running pack of sophomore Ayalew Taye and Mike Krisch and seniors Justin Scheid and Mike Banks. The aforementioned runners benefited from staying close and helped each other throughout the race. They never dropped further back than 12th through 15th place.
“I think what really made it special was once we got out and we really got into the woods and you looked around and saw that everybody on the team was carrying out the plan – that was inspiring during the race and just a great motivational help to maintain where you were,” Scheid said.
The five would finish within 14 seconds of each other, with Taye taking seventh (24:40), Miller finishing eighth, Scheid ninth, Krisch 10th, and Banks 11th (24:54). Redshirt freshman James Grimes rounded out the Hoyas’ top seven, finishing in 21st. With Bumbalough’s title and the pack’s strong showing, Georgetown shattered a 27-year-old Big East mark by scoring a record low 35 points, easily besting the 14-team field.
While the 10th-ranked Hoyas were heavy favorites in a down year for the conference, Head Coach Pat Henner kept the team focused, emphasizing that the team still needed to race well to earn the title.
“Sometimes when you think something is going to come easy, whether it’s a workout or a race, it’s always a lot harder than you think it’s going to be so I just wanted them to be mentally prepared to go out there and battle, battle for the win,” Henner said. “Obviously I’m really happy [with their performance today].”
The title is especially rewarding for the Hoyas who have been runner-up at the Big East championship for four years in a row.
“I couldn’t be more pleased with how we ran today,” Bumbalough said. “It’s been a long road, I’ve been here for all those seconds, and every year we thought we could win, and every year we ended up getting second.”
Added Taye: “This year we put in a lot of hard work – Coach started pushing us a lot. It seems like everybody is together, and when you look back and see how much hard work you did, you deserve that, you deserve to be a Big East champion.”
Women Finish Third Behind Ranked Foes
On the women’s side the race was strikingly similar to a year ago, as the 11th-ranked Hoyas again finished third to No. 6 Villanova and No. 5 West Virginia.
While failing to knock off the favored Wildcats and Mountaineers, Georgetown strengthened their case for an at-large NCAA bid by beating both Providence and Syracuse. With 13 at-large bids in total for those teams that do not automatically qualify for the national championships, points are awarded to schools for every team they beat during the regular season that automatically qualifies. With either the Friars or the Orange poised to take the final automatic bid in their region, the Hoyas will therefore receive points for this past weekend.
Leading the way for the women was freshman Katie McCafferty who placed eighth in 20:48. McCafferty, who had raced at Van Cortlandt several times in high school, used a familiarity with the course to move up nearly 15 places over the second half of the race.
“I probably went a little tougher on the hills than originally I was going to, but I felt awesome, so I just kind of went harder … trying to catch as many people as I could,” McCafferty said.
Following McCafferty were seniors Natasha LaBeaud and Liz Maloy who turned in solid team races to finish 11th and 12th respectively in 20:52 and 20:56. Freshman Emily Infeld also performed well, moving up throughout the race to round out a solid top four and finish 15th in 21:00.
Yet after Infeld, the gap widened between Georgetown’s fifth runner with junior Renee Tomlin finishing in 21:29 good for 28th place. Juniors Marcie Sobrinksi, Lauren Gregory and Lise Ogrodnick were close to Tomlin as well, giving the Hoyas a number of bodies who could possibly bridge the gap, and ultimately improve the team’s performance overall.
“The four of them – Renee, Marcie, Lise and Lauren – we want to make sure we can close that four to five gap and then we’ll know that we’ll be a much better team,” Head Coach Chris Miltenberg said.
This was only the second competitive meet of the season, and the Hoyas faced possibly the toughest conference in the nation. The team came out of the meet optimistic for their chances to improve at the regional race and, if they make it, national race.
“Overall I think it was great – we went into this meet knowing that it was up against a lot of good competition and that we wanted to use it get some good experience, race hard and then just keep going forward from here, and I think they did a good job of that,” Miltenberg said.
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