Women's Cross Country Follows Bishop's Lead, Runs Quickly
By Drew Perraut
Sports Associate

The women’s cross country team has had a fairly quiet season thus far. No race was comparable to Saturday’s Stanford Invitational. It was one of the most challenging meets of the year, but Pomona-Pitzer did very well and star Laura Bishop ’03 had a spectacular finish.

Held in Palo Alto, the invitational was a challenging race for the Hens on several different levels. First of all, the length of the course was an issue. Nika Strzelecka ’06 points out that this was “the very first 6K competition” for some members of the team. In addition, schools from all divisions and all areas, such as Duke and Texas A&M, attended the race. Running against Division III schools is more competitive, but the sheer number of runners was also a factor for the team.

Coach Kirk Reynolds said that the team’s biggest problem at the meet was breaking away from the pack. “Some of the girls got caught in the crowd and just weren’t able to run at the pace they wanted to,” he said. Bishop, P-P’s lead runner on Saturday, agreed, saying that at the beginning of the race she felt “swept along in the crowd.”

As a result of the difficult competition, the Hens finished twenty-second out of 23 teams. Though this sounds less than impressive, Coach Reynolds says that the ranking is deceptive because it pits P-P against Division I teams. When evaluated against other Division III teams, the Hens did well.

Saturday’s top runner was once again Bishop, who finished an impressive 37th out of 234 competitors with a time of 22:17. Bishop said that she “didn’t expect to have such a good race” but was very pleased with her time. Rounding out the top five were Amy Rapp ’06 (placing 120th with a time of 23:31), Dominika Stzrelecka '06 (placing 152nd with a time of 24:07), Ann Prouty '05 (placing 172nd with a time of 24:40), and Susie Roley '04 (placing 173rd with a time of 24:41)

In fact, on Saturday P-P beat C-M-S for the first time in recent memory, an achievement Rapp described as “very exciting for the entire team.” Victory over CMS has been a Sagehen dream for years, but now it is a reality. “Everything is very tight. We have to watch out and not become overconfident,” said Rapp.

The race was so close that Strzelecka notes that when the score is looked at as a dual meet “they just barely edged us out.” Nevertheless P-P has one win against CMS and Bishop said that this year’s SCIAC tournament “is really up in the air. We’re all pretty equal competitors this year, and the winner will just be the team that has a good race that day.”

Each of the remaining meets, two of which are SCIAC races, are critically important for the Sagehens.

“Saturday was the culmination of a hard part of the season for us,” said Coach Reynolds. “Now we have to concentrate on Conference. I think that the other teams will find themselves hard-pressed this year. I’m very excited. This is the strongest group of runners I’ve seen in a decade. We have everything you could want in a successful team.”

P-P’s next meet will be over fall break on October 19. The meet will be the first conference race of the year and will be a dual competition. Bishop is not intimidated by this, saying that “at a smaller meet like this one, it is much easier to know who you have to get past.”