The Road to Nationals: The 1999 Women's Cross Country Team
By Carly Graytock Shea '00
In my senior year at Bucknell, in the fall of 1999, I was co-captain of the Cross Country team with one of my best friends, Jen Hart. We came into the first week of practice with goals of wanting to win another Patriot League Cross Country Championship and to beat as many good teams as possible. We knew we had the potential, as Jen and I had been part of a team that slowly built momentum over the previous three years. We finished fourth as a team at the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional Championships our sophomore year. We won the Patriot League Cross Country Championships our junior year, after winning the Patriot League Indoor Track & Field Championship the year before, and we continued that Leagues' winning streak through the Indoor and Outdoor seasons. Our team's Regional performance our junior year was a bit disappointing, ninth place, so that lit a fire under our butts to do better our senior year. We had graduated a few of our key runners the previous year, but we also had underclassmen who were another year stronger and ready to step right into the spots that the previous years' seniors had vacated. And with a stroke of good luck, we also had a freshman walk-on who ended up being instrumental in our success that season.
Our first meet of the season we were pleasantly surprised by the freshman walk-on, Andrea Beisser '03. She ran right up front with Jen and me, and our top five runners finished within eight seconds of each other. That meet we beat Syracuse, a pretty solid team. We had another home meet a few weeks later, and this time we beat West Virginia, which at the time had a very strong program that included two runners who had qualified for the NCAAs in cross country and track previously, and both would go on to qualify as individuals for the 1999 NCAAs in cross country. Beating West Virginia was when Jen and I started to realize we might really be a good team, and maybe we could take some bigger scalps as the season progressed. What was helping us was how tightly packed our top five-seven runners were, often finishing within thirty seconds or less of each other.
Coach Gulden took us to the Pre-NCAA Cross Country Meet in mid-October. This was a strategic move on his part, learning from the year before. In 1998 the Bucknell men's team finished third at the Mid-Atlantic Regional, but failed to get an at-large bid to the NCAA Championships because they didn't have any points from beating better teams earlier in the season. Going to a race like Pre-Nats gave us a chance to beat teams from other regions who were likely to advance to the NCAAs on automatic bids. Coach knew that finishing ahead of as many teams as possible could help us if we found ourselves in the same position as the men had been at Regionals. We finished twenty-third out of thirty-five teams. Two of the teams we beat were Florida and Brown.
After Pre-Nats we won our second consecutive Patriot League Cross Country Championship with only seventeen points. Our top five (Becki Marshall '02, Andrea, Jen, myself, and Theresa Dennis '03) was broken up by a Lafayette runner who placed fourth in the race.
I don't remember if it was after Pre-Nats or after Leagues, but when the weekly top twenty-five ranked teams in the NCAA came out during one of those weeks in October, Bucknell was on the "also receiving votes" list, which was basically five teams in addition to the top twenty-five list. We headed into Regionals feeling pretty good about our chances and also with the awareness that we were a part of something that was becoming very special.
Regionals went about as perfectly as it could have. Georgetown and Villanova, always two of the best teams in the region in the nineties, predictably finished one-two. Bucknell finished third, beating strong teams like Princeton, West Virginia, Penn State, and Maryland. Because this was back before the Flotrack Kolas Calculator, we actually had to wait several days to find out that we made it to the NCAAs. We raced on Saturday and didn't know our fate for sure until Monday afternoon. Brown ended up finishing second at the Northeast Regional and Florida was second at the South Regional. Both teams were auto-qualifiers, and since we had beaten them at Pre-Nats, those two wins pushed us into the NCAA meet. We were pretty pumped when we got the official word.
Making it to the NCAAs was a huge deal, but we did not feel done with that accomplishment alone. We wanted to keep things rolling and take down even more teams at the national meet. We ended up finishing twenty-fourth as a team, out of thirty-one. Had we been told outright after finishing that we were twenty-fourth, we would have been ecstatic. We came to the NCAAs and beat seven teams! We weren't just a team that made it in by the skin of our teeth and finished dead last. The problem, though, was that they had instant results at this meet. I was our fifth runner that day. So when I crossed the line, the card given to me had my place and the team's place. The card said we were seventeenth! All five of us immediately said something along the lines of "Holy Crap!" We couldn't believe we had beaten almost half the teams at the NCAAs.
As it turned out, those were preliminary results, as most teams still didn't have their five runners in. The tight pack we had been running with all season had a spread of just thirty-two seconds at this meet. Only two teams had a better spread--BYU, which won the championship, at eighteen seconds, and the University of Washington, thirteenth place, at twenty seconds. Michigan State, fourteenth place, tied us with thirty-two seconds. That tight pack running had us all in quickly and ahead of many other schools' top five, so our preliminary results were skewed. In the end, we were still really proud and really excited with where we finished. My freshman year we finished third in the University race at ECACs (the old "Regional" qualifying meet), which was essentially the race for schools not good enough to compete in the Championship race to qualify for the NCAAs. By my senior year we were third in the Regional meet and qualified for the NCAAs. This was an incredible way to end my four years of cross country at Bucknell, and I will be forever grateful for the women of that team for working together to achieve that milestone.
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