W. X-Country's Garber qualifies for nationals

Penn senior captain Rita Garber was the No. 1 individual qualifier at the NCAA district championships at Navy. Nothing was torn down in celebration, and no near-riots ensued. Still, Rita Garber's performance this past Saturday may have been the day's best by a Penn athlete. "My one word for it is 'big-time'," Penn assistant women's track coach Tony Tenisci said. "She went in there and made the national championship. She didn't wait. She took control." Garber, the senior captain of the women's cross country team, was the first of four individuals to qualify for the NCAA Championships at Saturday's district meet. She blazed Navy's 5K course in 17:56.95. "The results for the race look like a dual meet except for Rita, " Penn assistant coach Cricket Shaklee-Batz. "Villanova and Georgetown dominated. She showed that she can run with the best." The Wildcats, ranked No.2 in the nation, trounced No. 8 Georgetown 19-32. All eight top finishers hailed from the two scholarship-granting schools. "This is definitely my biggest moment as an athlete here," Garber said. "Looking at the results afterwards, I realized that I was able to beat some big names." Garber grabbed ninth place overall and, in the process, bested top contenders Christine Kane of St. Joseph's, Erin Davis of Penn State and Kate Landau, the Hoya standout, just to name a few. "She just moved up throughout the whole race," Shaklee-Batz said. "At the first half-mile, she was 23rd. By the time she got through two miles, she was fifth individually [fifth not counting runners on the top two teams, who qualified automatically] and she just moved up from there. We were yelling her position to her whenever we could see her." "Betty took me aside before the start," Garber said. "She told me, for one time only, just not to worry about my mile splits or anything, just to go out and run. I guess I took her advice to heart." The Quakers will need to wait another season to break their 17-year team-qualification drought for nationals. Garber is, however, the first Quaker to make NCAA's since All-American Chris Lundy did it in 1991. The Red and Blue sent only four female competitors to Annapolis on Saturday. Thus, they were automatically one short of the five scorers needed to vie for the district championship. Sophomore Meredith Rossner finished 61st in 19:34.41, and junior Stephanie Bell was 75th with a time of 19:41.99. Team results, however, pale in comparison to Garber's performance. "I think it'll be hard for people to understand how big a deal this is. Making nationals is huge," freshman men's track distance runner Matt Gioffre said. Garber's ninth-place finish represents the apex of a season that saw her capture her first career title at the Delaware Invitational on September 19. Despite the last-place performance logged by the Quakers at the Heptagonal championships on October 30, Garber finished ninth in the challenging conference. "Unlike other sports, our conference has some of the country's top teams," Shaklee-Batz said. "Rita has been battling against excellent people all year." Despite predictions that gave her a solid chance to qualify individually, Garber had limited herself solely to thinking about qualifying out of Penn's district, and not about preparations for NCAA finals, which will be run in Lawrence, Kansas, on November 23. "I don't even know what I'm going to do when I get there," Garber said. "I'm just going to keep on training like I have over the past few weeks." · Men's Season Ends With a Whimper What a difference a month makes. At this time one month ago, the Penn men's cross country team was preparing to leave for the west coast and the Oregon Invitational. They were coming off a meet at Penn State where the Quakers defeated rival Navy and where junior Sean MacMillan galvanized the team by taking third overall. "It wasn't that long ago when we were about No.24 or No.25 in the nation," coach Charlie Powell said. Now, just a few weeks later, the Quakers have finished their season in disappointing fashion. They managed to only beat five of the 19 teams in the field at this past Saturday's district championships. "Personally, I see the season as a big disappointment," sophomore Bryan Kovalsky said. For the second consecutive race, MacMillan, the Quakers' pacesetter, was unable to run. Junior captain Scott Clayton barely cracked the top 50, taking 49th with a time of 32:41.03, and Kovalsky's 58th position fell short of expectations. "It's like the story of the Phoenix, except that we've only been able to figure out the first part," Powell said. "We have to find a way rise from this." Many teams nailed Penn's coffin shut at districts, but Princeton and Georgetown were clearly the class of the competition. The Tigers outdid the scholarship Hoyas 57-76. Daniel Kinyua, a transplanted Kenyan from Mt. St. Mary's took top individual honors by negotiating the 10K Navy course in just under 31 minutes. "The race went pretty much according to plan for the other teams," Powell said. "It's easy to forget that there was a point in this season when we were real contenders in the district." The health of the Quakers is a major reason for their precipitous decline. Not only did MacMillan discover health problems as the season progressed. Kovalsky and freshman Anthony Ragucci have both complained of possible stress fractures. "I ran the best race that I could have on Saturday," Kovalsky said. "I went out conservative just so I wouldn't bomb. It's not the way to have an amazing race, but it got the job done considering the circumstances." Circumstances have made the Quakers glad to see their season end.

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