As they have done all season, an outstanding sophomore class led the Penn men's cross country team to a seventh-place finish at the Heptagonal Championships.
Dusty Leib led the Quakers with a 12th-place finish, running New York's five-mile Van Cortlandt Park course in 25:08.6.
Fellow second-year classmate Nolan Tully was 33rd with a time of 25:12, while sophomore Stephen Hayes finished 54th in a time of 25:44.7.
"Three of our guys did extremely well, but we needed a few more to step up," Penn coach Charlie Powell said.
Leib and Tully's impressive finishes also earned them Second-Team All-Ivy honors.
The Heptagonal Championships is theIvy League, plus Navy, title meet. The Quakers bettered last year's ninth-place finish at the event, but were unsuccessful dethroning three-peat champion Dartmouth.
The Red and Blue also finished behind Columbia, Princeton, Navy, Brown and Harvard.
"It was a typical Heps meet," Powell said. "Pretty wild, pretty crazy."
Dartmouth's top runner, junior Jarrod Shoemaker, narrowly defeated his own teammate, Tom McArdle, at the finish line for the individual title.
Although the season has seen much improvement from the Quakers, the Red and Blue still finished 114 points behind the Heps champions.
The Red and Blue began the season with an impressive victory at the Ram Invitational. Dusty Lieb won the individual title on the same course on which the Heps were run.
The following week, the team took fifth at the Paul Short Classic with Tully and Leib leading the squad, finishing 14th and 15th.
Penn then won the Philly Classic with strong finishes by sophomores Stephen Hayes (3rd), Dan Treglia (4th) and Dusty Lieb (6th).
The Quakers continued their success with a 14th-place finish at the competitive Pre-National Meet in Indiana.
"[The season] has been going very well for a young, young team with no experience up front," Powell said.
Lieb, Tully and Hayes again led the squad, with Lieb placing 77th in the race.
The same weekend, with a split squad, Penn placed second at the Delaware Invitational, with four Quakers among the top 20.
Sophomore Scott Sebens (7th) and freshman Mark Materna (8th) led the team at that meet.
While the Quakers did not dominate at Heps, they established themselves as a rising team to watch in the coming years.
With the base of the team centered around five outstanding sophomores and the loss of only one senior to graduation after this year, the Red and Blue have promising potential to rise to the next level with a possibility of national prowess in the years to come.
This article reported that Nolan Tully placed 33rd and Stephen Hayes placed 54th in the Heptagonal Championships. In fact, Tully was 14th and Hayes was 33rd.
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