Belsley caps solid season with stellar showing

In a near-spectacular finish to an outstanding individual season, junior Michelle Belsley finished 39th out of 200 runners at Saturday's ECAC championships in Boston. Belsley, who ran her fastest time of the year at 18 minutes, 4 seconds, missed qualifying for the national championships by only seven seconds. The teams at the ECACs are divided into two different regions. The top two teams in both regions qualify all seven runners for nationals, and the top seven individual runners in each region who are not members of the top two teams also qualify. Because runners from dozens of teams in both regions all ran the race simultaneously, it was impossible for Belsley to know how high she needed to place in order to qualify for nationals. When the race was finished, Belsley learned she would have qualified had she finished three positions higher. "She had the absolute best race of her life," Penn assistant Tony Tenisci said. "She was brilliant, and she beat some incredible people." Belsley, who normally starts her races at a very quick pace, ran a relatively slow first-mile time of 5:27 on the muddy course. "I was looking at the wrong guy to start the race," Belsley said. "A girl I know who was racing near me told me, 'You better get moving Michelle.' But because I started so slowly, I was able to finish faster than I usually do." All-American Chris Lundey was the last Penn woman to qualify for the cross-country nationals, doing so in 1988 and 1990. "Michelle is really a half-miler and really doesn't know quite what she's doing yet," Tenisci said. "Chris Lundey was not a half-miler. She ran much longer distances and cross-country was an easy transition for her. "If she stays healthy, there's no stopping her next year." Belsley's impressive performance at the ECACs capped a season that also included back-to-back first-place finishes at the Rutgers and Lafayette Invitationals and a ninth-place finish at the Heptagonal championships. For the women's team as a whole, however, this season can best be characterized as mediocre. After peaking early in the year with a team victory at Lafayette, the Quakers ran more and more poorly in every successive meet. At the season-ending Heptagonals, Penn finished last out of eight teams, leaving only Belsley, who qualified individually, to compete at ECACs. But for Michelle Belsley, this cross-country season was an opportunity to find new talents within herself and attain individual success.