The Daily
Free Press - Sports
Issue:
Freshman Ryan kicks open
door with a bang – and a win
By Kevin Scheitrum
The
“It was a pretty hectic day,” she said.
But once she got here — luckily for the Terriers — Ryan concentrated on her
running enough to win her first collegiate race. She came in at
Ryan stepped up to fill the void created when sophomore captain Jess Iannacci
made a wrong turn on the course and had to retrace her steps, in what coach
Bruce Lehane called an “unusual race.” Iannacci held the lead for the majority
of the race, until she took the wrong trail with just under a mile to go. She
eventually gutted her way back from 10th to sixth, but only to get a bite of
the dust Ryan was providing her opponents.
“It was more disappointing than embarrassing,” Iannacci said. “But it was
really important for Marisa to step up. She did a great job, and she set the
tone for the rest of the freshmen.”
Ryan’s win was the deciding factor in the meet, as the teams ended up tied. In
the case of a tie, the tiebreaker goes to the team with the better finishes in
head-to-head matchups of their first through seventh runners. The Terriers had
four runners finish ahead of their respective opponents to earn the win.
But after her surprise win, Ryan blew her own horn less than a guitarist.
“It was sort of a win by default, I guess,” she said. “I’d have been just as
happy if I came in second behind [Iannacci]. But it was really cool. It was a
great course and a great day for our first meet.”
Even with the win, the women have a figurative marathon to go before they are
where they need to be. There is, however, some consolation in the fact that the
team usually starts slow, Lehane said.
“Had Jess completed the course, we would have won more comfortably,” he said.
“But we need to accelerate more than a minute. We averaged around 19 [minutes].
We need to get to 18 [minutes], possibly under, if we’re going to get anything
done.”
Despite the fact that the girls did not win as convincingly as they would have
wanted, it was still a win. That bodes well for team confidence, according to
Iannacci.
“We’re going to have a good year,” she said. “Everyone realizes that. It was
nice to start off with a win, but as the season progresses, it’s amazing how
everyone progresses.”
In terms of progress, the men appear to have more to make. They dropped the
meet to Colgate by five points, a race that BU ran a “little less than fair,”
according to Lehane. Team captains Jochen Dieckfoss — last year’s America East
champion — and Jordan Jones ran races not up to their usual standards.
Dieckfoss, despite finishing second at 25:18 on the eight-kilometer course
behind Colgate’s Xavier de Boissezon, was disappointing, Lehane said.
“Jochen ran a pretty subpar race,” he said. “
But the cloud of uncertainty for the men does have a “silver lining,” Lehane
said. Just as the female freshmen stepped up, so did the lesser-heralded batch
of runners for the men.
Sophomores Dan Coval and Mike Fisher and graduate transfer student Kyle Kinney
“kept us with Colgate,” Jones said adding he understands the importance of
having the younger, less-experienced runners start strong.
“Jochen and I could have run a lot faster,” he said. “But the three, four and
five men ran solid races. Mike Fisher ran a breakthrough race — probably the
best college race he’s run. We didn’t really expect him to be there.”
On the whole, the race provided the teams with a few good signs of things to
come. But both teams have a long way to go, Lehane said.
“We have to step it up,” he said. “I can see the makings of a good team, but
it’s just the makings. In the progression of the season, we usually get knocked
around early and come on later. But you can’t take that for granted. If you sit
back and think it’ll just fall into place, it won’t.”
With meets coming up in the near future in New York City on Sept. 27 and the
New England Championships on Oct. 10, where the “competition goes way up,”
Lehane said he hopes those things will start falling into place soon.
“This was a relatively easy meet, and we split one and went to a tiebreaker on
the other,” Lehane said with a somewhat concerned laugh.
“We need to press on,” he continued with a tone firmer than BU’s overnight
guest policy. “We need to lift our standard of
performance.”
Luckily for the team, lifting that performance could very well entail a few
hundred-mile weeks of practice, Jones said.