It was a historic weekend for the men’s and women’s cross country teams. Both teams claimed first place at the NCAA Regional Championships for the first time in school history. The women have dominated the field all season, and the story was essentially the same on Saturday; the men have struggled all year to live up to their potential, making this weekend’s dramatic one-point win over archrival Williams College in the biggest race of the season all the more sweet.

Women

Of the women’s victory, senior runner Meg Ray said, “The really exciting thing about this is that even if you took out our top two girls, the scores from runners three through seven would still have won the race by 15 points.” Ray is being modest. They would have won by 20.

All seven women were named to the All-New England team by finishing in the top 35. The Jeffs’ five scorers were all in the top 15, qualifying them for the All-Regional team. Ray said the women “went into the day expecting a win,” so to prevent them from becoming complacent, Head Coach Erik Nedeau set a goal of putting all seven runners in the top 20. Though no team has ever accomplished the feat, Amherst came close, with the Jeffs’ seventh finisher, junior Nicole Anderson, claiming 23rd place.

Amherst was led, once again, by senior captain Heather Wilson, who finished second with a time of 21:31.2. She was followed by her fellow senior and captain, Kim Partee, in sixth. Also in the top 10 were juniors Elise Tropiano in seventh and Caitlin McDermott-Murphy in 10th, and Ray rounded the Jeffs’ scoring in 15th. Sophomore Sophia Galleher, who had felt “a little off the past few weeks,” according to Ray, ran well and finished 21st, displacing no fewer than three runners of second-place Williams’ runners.

Next week the women will head to Nationals to try to avenge last year’s one-point loss to Middlebury. Though the Jeffs are ranked first in the country, they will face stiff competition from “Calvin College, Washington University, SUNY Geneseo and SUNY Plattsburgh, [which] all have strong front runners and tight packs to back them up,” said Partee.

But Amherst’s varsity women have not lost to a Div. III team this year, and Partee doesn’t intend to start next week: “I have been wanting to win the cross country national title since Coach Ned mentioned the possibility of it back when I was looking at Amherst as a high school senior,” said Partee. “Now that I am a senior here, I feel that everything has come together: the team, the training and the desire, which will all result in a great race.”

Men

“We have been told [and have known] that we are as good a team as Williams,” said Carlyle Eubank ’10 on Sunday. “But until yesterday we were not able to prove it.” The Amherst men had lost to the rival Ephs five times in as many meetings this year, and each time they insisted things could have been different. Saturday, things were different, as the Jeffs claimed a dramatic one-point victory over Williams and won the meet.

The win was a true team effort; if any of Amherst’s top five had dropped by even one spot, it would have cost the team first place. Leading the way was Will Yochum in ninth place, the top finisher among all first-years and Amherst’s only member of the All-Region team. He beat James Butcher ’09 of Middlebury, who finished in 10th place, by only half of a second. Next was rookie Florian Reichert in 17th, also just half of a second in front of his nearest competitor.

Still, the Ephs’ top three runners beat Amherst’s, so it was the Jeffs’ depth that won them the race. Sophomores Eubank, Dan Murner and Eric Holaday ran together and finished 29th, 30th and 32nd, respectively—well ahead of the Ephs’ bottom two. All five Amherst scorers made the All-New England team. Eubank was especially impressed by Holaday’s heart: “Despite stomach problems and a course that was less suited to his strengths, he had an awesome race.” As the fifth Jeff runner, Holaday clinched the victory by edging Westfield State’s Andy Messer by one-tenth of a second, the smallest recordable margin.

The men didn’t find out that they had won until 15 minutes after they finished. Nedeau was giving a post-race speech when the women’s team came running over from the coaches’ tent to report the unofficial results. Captain Mike Harbus ’08 expressed his elation at the result: “I think that this Regionals this past weekend marked a turning point for Amherst men’s cross country, and I have a feeling that from this point on, we will be viewed as a force to be reckoned with on both a regional and national level.”

Each team was excited for the other, and the sweep of Regionals seems to have built new unity on an already tight-knit squad. “The women’s team did extremely well and won their race, so to be able to match their performance, albeit not in as dominant a fashion, was pretty cool,” said Eubank. Partee echoed a similar sentiment: “It was really great winning our first regional title, but I think I was even more excited when we found out the guys’ team had managed to pull an upset win over Williams.”