MacMillan's illness slows M. X-Country

Junior Sean MacMillan's absence left theQuakers without their No. 1 runner. Penn coach Charlie Powell likened it to "a basketball team in the playoffs without their go-to guy." When the Penn men's cross country team reached the starting line of the 1998 Heptagonal Championships in the Bronx on Friday, they were without junior Sean MacMillan, the runner who has led the Quakers in each of the previous five races of the season. MacMillan has been battling serious flu-like symptoms for over a week now. He has made numerous trips the hospital here at Penn, and his fever has been as high as 103 degrees. "Sean was too sick to make the trip," Powell said. "The fact that he wasn't there affected the team. It set off a snowball effect that just kept us out of the race." The Red and Blue finished the conference championships a disappointing sixth place in the nine team field. Junior captain Scott Clayton, the only Quaker to crack the top ten, logged a solid time of 25:14 on his way to ninth place. "I'm pretty pleased with my performance," Clayton said. "I didn't really step up, but I didn't have a bad race either." Clayton is one of the very few Penn runners pleased with his performance on Friday. "I had a terrible race," freshman Matt Gioffre said. "And mostly everybody else had big problems too." Sophomore Bryan Kovalsky, who finished 25th while dealing with persistent leg pain, was the only other Quaker to finish in the top 25 of the 80 runners assembled at Van Cortlandt Park. Forty-four seconds behind Kovalsky's 25:43 was junior Jason Greene in 47th place. Penn did not seriously challenge the elite teams of the Ivy league. The Quakers lost to fifth-place Navy, a team they defeated earlier in the season, by 59 points, and narrowly squeaked past seventh place Cornell by a slim margin of one point. The Princeton Tigers, the nation's No. 23 ranked team, handily won the conference championship. The runners from Old Nassau outstripped second-place No.22 Dartmouth by 16 points. Michael Grant of third-place Columbia took top individual honors on Friday. He scorched the hills of Van Cortlandt with a time of 24:40, 14 seconds ahead of his nearest competitor. "This is the fastest I've seen this race in the past five or six years," Powell said. "But it wasn't like we didn't have a shot. We just never were able to make any moves." Right now the Quakers' team morale is the lowest it has been thus far this season. It appeared as if everything went sour at once on Friday. "When it comes to our attitude, the situation is not real good," Powell said. "There seems to be too much questioning going on right now. They have to remember that they're a better team than Friday showed." The Heptagonal Championships marks the beginning of the cross country team's rather brief home stretch. Slightly less than two weeks from now, Penn will send its top seven to the NCAA District I Championships at the same Van Cortlandt course that treated them so poorly on Friday. Districts will offer the Quakers the chance to end their season on a pleasant note. Due to the relatively lackluster performance of the Mid-Atlantic region so far this season, only two teams will receive bids to compete in the National Championships in Kansas on November 23. "As the captain, I really think it's going to be tough to get the team mentally prepared to run at Districts, but we're definitely going to give it a try," Clayton said. The Quakers are a young and not terribly deep team. Therefore, a blow like the loss of MacMillan is bound to adversely affect their chances. "We don't have the depth of these other teams," Powell said. "But I know that we're a better team than we showed on Friday." The Quakers have shown glimpses of excellence this season. They beat a very solid Columbia at the Delaware Invitational on September 19. Racing ahead Navy at the Penn State Invitational must also constitute a highlight of the season. "It's not as if we have even peaked yet," Powell said. "Stuff has interfered over the past few weeks. We need to get our heads together." If the Quakers hope to have a shot at playing the role of spoiler two weeks from now, they need to put Friday's disappointment behind them.