Tomorrow marks the final meet in the men's cross country season, and the Quakers are desperate to end the season on a high note after coming in last at the prestigious Heptagonal Championships.
They will run the NCAA District Championships at Lehigh, the site of a nasty, muddy race several weeks ago. The conditions might have been a mess in that race, but the Quakers rallied to a fifth-place finish overall.
"Lehigh was just not a fun race," Penn freshman Nolan Tully said.
Only the top seven runners will compete for the Quakers in the Championships. The list as it stands now is senior captain Matt Gioffre, senior Matt Caporaletti, junior Anthony Sager and freshmen Nolan Tully, Dan Treglia, Josh Joseph, Stephen Hayes.
The Quakers are a very young team this year, with almost half the runners hailing from the Class of 2005, something that bodes well for the next three years.
"A lot of the freshmen met their goals for the season within a few weeks, and they are now about 30 seconds ahead of their targets," Penn coach Charlie Powell said.
Thirty seconds may not sound like a whole lot of time since cross country races are often won with times over 25 minutes, but the amount of effort that goes into improving by that much in such a short period is no small matter.
"I expected high mileage and a competitive team when I came to Penn," freshman Matt Van Antwerp said. "I wasn't used to the mileage at first but now I am.
"I was supposed to peak at 70 miles per week, but one week we all beat our goals by about 10 miles and I did 80.5, and then I still hit the mid-seventies the following week."
In spite of their last-place disappointment at Heps on Oct. 26, the Quakers are not discouraged going into this weekend.
"For next season, we are definitely looking for an improvement at Heps," Van Antwerp said. "Our team can definitely be third or fourth. It was just a bad race this year, with a lot of injuries and a lot of people got discouraged, and it all added up to a bad performance."
The intensity of the Ivy League rivalries at Heps is something the freshmen now understand fully, and they are aware of just how hard they will have to work to maintain their focus next year.
"Coming into collegiate competition is a lot like going from high school classes to college classes," Powell said.
"In high school, you can succeed if you read it over once or twice, but in college you have to not only read it, but really understand it. The pressure of collegiate competition is like that too."
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