M.X-C posts solid times at the IC4As

A step forward. That's the positive spin put on the results of Saturday's IC4A Championships at Franklin Park in Boston, Mass., where the men's cross country team ran to a 13th-place finish in a field of 26. Penn walks away from its final race of the season encouraged by its defeat of Dartmouth, an Ivy team which had beaten the Quakers at the Heptagonal Championships two weeks ago, and pleased with the solid times posted over the 10-kilometer course. "Everybody ran fairly fast. I would take it as a positive step forward for the younger guys for next year," senior captain Matt Wilkinson said. "The most important thing is that everyone is in great shape and will only get better through the indoor and outdoor seasons." Freshman Joe Campagna's race stands out as the bright spot for Penn as it moves on to prepare for the start of the indoor track season. Picking up the slack left by injured Paolo Frescura, Campagna adapted well to his first taste of a 10 km cross country course. Without placing a runner among the top ten individually, Villanova won the IC4As by running an exceptional team race. Their five top runners finished within 40 seconds of one another, displaying the type of team pack running that the Quakers struggled with all season. St. John's and Army walked away with the other two berths from District 2 into the NCAA team championships. Brown University also finds itself with a berth into the NCAAs, edging out Providence by a single point and finishing second in much weaker District 1 competition. The Bears' third, fourth and fifth runners each out dueled their Providence rival to seal the final qualifying spot. Many District 2 schools walked away with only frustration after watching weaker District 1 schools lock up bids and plane tickets to the NCAAs. Seven schools from District 2 all finished ahead of both top qualifier Boston University and Brown, but four of them are left as spectators and not participants in the NCAAs due to the unequal district divisions. Quakers captain Matt Wilkinson also found himself the victim of uneven district divisions, finishing 28th in district 2 in a time of 30 minutes, 18 seconds. The time, Wilkinson's best ever on a 10 km course, would most likely have qualified him individually for the NCAAs if he had competed in district 1. Wilkinson, however, didn't complain about his apparent misfortune. "I don't think that I messed up. I ran hard," Wilkinson said. "I would have liked to have finished higher up, but it just didn't work out that way. The race was really fast and really deep. It came down to a lot of guys with pretty similar capabilities."

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