Micah Lawson finished 25th at the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional on Friday, 2.6 seconds clear of 26th, and that margin was the difference between an All-Region senior and the first man out. It is the second straight year Lawson has earned the honor on the Goodman Campus course, and he was the only Scarlet Knight in either race to finish inside the top 25.
The men scored 284 and placed ninth of 26 teams in the 10,000 meters, two places below the seventh they took on this course a year ago, which was the best
regional finish in program history. The women scored 406 for 13th of 28 in the 6,000 meters, the same place as last November. Villanova won the men’s race with 39 points and West Virginia the women’s with 19, and the automatic bids to the NCAA Championships went to those two, Georgetown and Penn State. Rutgers’ season ends in Bethlehem, where it began in September.
Lawson, Rossi, and Kyvelos Finish in the Top 50
Lawson led the men in 30:32.7. Gavin Rossi, the junior Monmouth transfer who beat him by three-tenths of a second to win the Lehigh Invitational on this course, was 36th in 30:52.8, and Stephen Kyvelos, a junior, was 45th in 31:05.2.
Then came a 41.8-second hole.
Jay Adimala, the freshman state champion from Colts Neck, scored fourth in 31:47.0 for 89th, and Hisham Ettayebi, a senior, closed the five in 31:55.6 for 95th. Maan Patel, a junior (105th, 32:07.1), and Ryan Smith, a senior (129th, 32:25.2), displaced.
The math was 25-36-45-87-91 for 284. Adimala and Ettayebi finished 89th and 95th but scored 87th and 91st, because runners from George Washington and Maryland-Eastern Shore, neither of which put five men across the line, came out of the scoring order.
Saint Joseph’s, the team Rutgers beat 35-36 in the opener, took sixth with 222 from 31-37-38-49-67. Rutgers’ first three scored 106 points. So did Saint Joseph’s first three. The entire 62-point margin came from the fourth and fifth men, 178 points for Rutgers against 116 for the Hawks. Their one-through-five spread was 32.4 seconds to Rutgers’ 83, the same shape as September, when the Hawks also ran the tighter pack and lost by a point. This time there was no Rossi and Lawson finish at the front to cover it.
Forty-one seconds apiece from Adimala and Ettayebi would have moved Rutgers past Penn, Penn State, Saint Joseph’s and Navy into fifth. Penn State, the only other Big Ten program in the men’s race, was seventh with 225, and Penn eighth with 228. American was 10th, nine points behind Rutgers, and host Lehigh 15th. Georgetown’s five finished within 0.6 seconds of one another and were second.
David Leads the Way Again Into a Top 40 Finish
Lorena David, a senior, has led Rutgers in every race she has run this fall, and Friday she was 31st in 20:42.6, 16.4 seconds out of the last All-Region spot. Kelseigh O’Neil, a junior, was 62nd in 21:12.3. Sofia Condron, a senior, and Maeli Gleason, a sophomore, came through 2.5 seconds apart in 94th and 96th, in 21:35.7 and 21:38.2, and freshman Daphne Roskowski scored fifth in 21:59.5 for 126th. Freshman Lydia Bereznitski (159th, 22:37.3) and sophomore Gianna Hernandez (172nd, 22:55.5) displaced.
The math was 31-62-93-95-125 for 406, a team time of 1:47:08.3 and an average of 21:25.7, on a one-through-five spread of 1:16.9. Condron, Gleason and Roskowski each scored one place better than they finished, because the NJIT runner in 81st was not on a scoring team.
La Salle took 12th with 391 on a team time of 1:47:00.4, 7.9 seconds faster than Rutgers’ across five runners. Spread over the scorers, that is 2.9 seconds a runner. Condron alone would have needed 9.5, nearly the 9.7 she would have needed to pass Bucknell on this same course at Paul Short in October. Rutgers’ back two actually beat La Salle’s, 220 points to 236. La Salle’s front three beat Rutgers’ by 31.
Rutgers finished 12 points ahead of host Lehigh and 33 ahead of Maryland, the third Big Ten program in the race. Penn State was second with 83 behind West Virginia’s 1-2-3-4-9, and Joy Naukot won the race in 19:19.1.
Three Trips to Goodman
After the first meet, I noted that what Friday carried forward was the ground itself, because Rutgers would run Goodman twice more. After Big Tens, I wrote that a second look at a course had been worth seconds to almost everyone on this roster, and that Lehigh would be the third.
For the women, it was.
All six Rutgers women who ran Paul Short here on Oct. 2 ran faster over the same 6,000 meters Friday. David was 1:02.7 quicker, Roskowski 1:02.4 and Condron 59.4. The scoring five averaged 21:25.7, against 22:01.6 in October. That comes with the caveat it came with then. Paul Short was run in heat that ended the day early, and some of that time is the weather giving it back.
The men are harder to measure, because they ran 6K here in September, 8K in October and 10K on Friday. The one clean comparison is Lawson against himself. A year ago, on this course at this distance, he ran 30:19.5 for 20th. Friday he was 13.2 seconds slower and five places lower. So I was right about the women and, at best, half right about the men.
The freshmen were the other part of it. Adimala, Rutgers’ eighth man at Nuttycombe, scored for the second straight meet in his first collegiate 10,000 meters. Roskowski scored fifth in a championship race for the second straight meet, and Bereznitski displaced again. Three of the 14 runners in Rutgers’ two top sevens were freshmen. Molly Domurat, who scored third at Paul Short and Nuttycombe and did not finish at Big Tens, was not in the results.
None of this was an incredulous breakthrough. The women were 13th for the second straight year, the men stepped back from the best regional finish they have ever had, and Penn State’s women are going to the NCAA Championships while Rutgers is going home. David, Condron, Lawson, Ettayebi and Smith are seniors. Everyone else in both top sevens is not.
The lesson from the last trip to Goodman is not complicated. A men’s team whose front three can match Saint Joseph’s point for point does not need another look at the course. They need a fourth and fifth man in the 31:10s. The women need less than that. Three seconds a runner is not a gap, it is a stopwatch.
