Lorena David was 94th when the women’s 6,000 meters came through its first split on Friday at the Zimmer Championship Course in Madison, Wis. She passed 47 runners from there to the finish, crossed 47th in 20:48.7, and Rutgers still came up two points short of 14th place.
The women scored 422 and placed 15th of 18 at the Big Ten Championships, two behind Purdue’s 420 and ahead of Maryland, Ohio State and USC. The men scored 349 and placed 13th of 15, 12 points behind Iowa and ahead of Nebraska and Ohio State.
Oregon swept both races, with 35 points for the women and 23 for the men. A year ago in East Lansing, Rutgers’ women were 16th and the men 11th.
David Climbs, and Two Points Get Away
David, a senior, ran the opposite of the race she ran here three weeks ago. In the Nuttycombe B race she was 13th at 2K and faded to 34th. Friday she was 94th at 1.1K, 77th at 2K, 67th at 3K and 54th at 4K, and she finished 50.9 seconds faster than she ran on this course on Oct. 9.
The next Rutgers woman came through 53 places later.
Kelseigh O’Neil, a junior who led Rutgers at this meet a year ago in 44th, was 100th in 21:33.8. Sofia Condron, a senior, climbed from 140th at 1.1K to finish 102nd in 21:35.6, and Maeli Gleason, a sophomore, was 103rd in 21:38.3, three runners across the line inside 4.5 seconds. Daphne Roskowski, a freshman, scored fifth in 22:04.1 for 126th. Gianna Hernandez (139th, 22:48.5) and freshman Lydia Bereznitski (145th, 23:17.1) displaced.
Molly Domurat did not finish. The freshman from Flemington, a state champion who scored third for Rutgers at both Paul Short and Nuttycombe, came through 1.1K in 3:52.1 and 2K in 7:16.7, near the back of the field, and has no split recorded after that, indicating that she did not finish.
The math was 47-87-89-90-109 for 422, a team time of 1:47:40.5 and an average of 21:32.1, with a one-through-five spread of 1:15.5. O’Neil finished 100th but scored 87, because 13 runners ahead of her were the eighth or ninth women on their own teams and did not count.
Purdue’s 420 came from 31-83-100-101-105, a front runner in Lauren Pegher and four women sitting right on top of Rutgers’ pack. Half a second from each Rutgers scorer would have flipped it. So would 1.6 seconds from David alone, or 3.6 from Roskowski, who finished 4.9 seconds behind Purdue’s fifth woman. Had Domurat run the 21:49.5 she ran here on Oct. 9, Rutgers scores 408 and takes 14th, five points behind Iowa.
Rossi Leads, and Adimala Scores
Gavin Rossi, a junior in his first season since transferring from Monmouth, led Rutgers in 40th in 23:55.8. He ran the middle of the race better than anyone in scarlet, moving from 92nd at 2K to 28th at 5.75K, then gave back 12 places over the last 1,250 meters. His time was still 21.9 seconds faster than his Nuttycombe time.
Micah Lawson, a senior, was 70th in 24:25.0, 29.2 seconds behind Rossi. Lawson led Rutgers in 56th at this meet a year ago and closed from 27th to 14th in the Nuttycombe B race, but Friday he was 102nd at 2K and still 75th with 1,250 meters left, and he ran 13.9 seconds slower on this course than he did three weeks ago.
Stephen Kyvelos and Maan Patel, both juniors, ran together for all 8,000 meters and finished two-tenths of a second apart, Kyvelos 85th in 24:45.5 and Patel 86th in 24:45.7. Kyvelos was 32.8 seconds faster than at Nuttycombe.
Jay Adimala, the freshman state champion from Colts Neck, scored fifth in 25:02.9 for 98th. He was Rutgers’ eighth man at Nuttycombe and ran 50.6 seconds faster Friday. Hisham Ettayebi (105th, 25:08.7) and Ryan Smith (115th, 25:25.7) displaced. Marty Brophy was 121st, and Sean Matthews, sixth for Rutgers at Nuttycombe, was the last of the race’s 123 finishers in 26:39.3.
The math was 39-64-78-79-89 for 349, a team time of 2:02:54.9 and an average of 24:35.0, with a one-through-five spread of 1:07.2. A year ago that spread was 23 seconds. Rossi finished 40th and scored 39 because Oregon’s eighth man finished 20th.
Iowa’s 337 came from 48-52-72-81-84 on a 49.7-second spread. Four seconds from each Rutgers scorer passes them, and so do 9.9 from Rossi alone. Rutgers beat Nebraska by 12 and Ohio State by 26, while Oregon put all five scorers in the top eight scoring places and host Wisconsin was second with 62.
Same Course, Three Weeks Later
I wrote after Princeton that this team was not fully ready for the Big Ten, and the standings unfortunately agree. The men were 11th of 15 a year ago and are 13th now. The women moved up one place, to 15th, and finished 45 points clear of Maryland and two short of Purdue.
What the standings do not show is the clock. Fourteen Rutgers runners raced Zimmer at both Nuttycombe and Big Tens, and 12 of them were faster on Friday. The women’s average dropped from 21:54.6 to 21:32.1 without the runner who had scored third in both of their last two meets. David found 50.9 seconds, Condron 36.3 and Gleason 30.3. Only Lawson and Matthews went backward.
The second look at Zimmer was worth something.
Two Fridays three weeks apart are not a controlled experiment. The weather changes, and a championship race goes out at a different pace than a B race. But 12 of 14 is not noise either.
The freshmen were part of it. Three of the 14 runners in Rutgers’ two top sevens were freshmen, and Adimala went from eighth man to scorer in three weeks. In August, I noted that this class does not close the gap to the rest of the conference, it narrows it. Adimala in 98th and Roskowski scoring fifth is what narrowing looks like. Domurat not finishing, on the day her points would have been worth 14th place, is the other half of that sentence.
And the gap is still the gap. Oregon’s fifth man finished eighth. Rutgers’ first man finished 40th.
Rutgers goes back to the Goodman Campus course at Lehigh for the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional on Nov. 13, the ground where they opened the season with a sweep and ran Paul Short in the heat. Last November, the men were seventh there and the women 13th.
Friday showed that a second look at a course was worth seconds to almost everyone on this roster, and Lehigh will be the third. Two points is not much of a consolation, but it is a margin, and a team that loses by a margin can count exactly what it is missing.
