Northwestern’s performance at the Big Ten championships was best embodied by two runners who had staggeringly diverging results.
On one end of the spectrum was Allison King, who, in just her second race of 2007, placed first for the Wildcats at the conference championships. The junior, who missed much of the season with a hearing-related ailment, was one of the team’s lone bright spots in a disappointing 10th-place finish.
“I was really happy – kind of surprised – with my own race, but it was difficult because the team didn’t do what we wanted to do,” King said. “I was hurting for the team, and I didn’t want my personal success to interfere with that atmosphere because it was important to acknowledge that we hadn’t done what we intended to do.”
On the other end is junior Carly Brown, NU’s top runner for most of the year. After going into Big Tens expecting to run with the lead pack, Brown finished eighth for the Cats and 97th overall. Looking back on the race a week later, Brown sounded almost like a disaster victim.
“I think it just all happened so fast,” Brown said. “But you just run through it and you finish the race, and you just move on.”
Still, she has not been one to dwell on what was her only letdown in an otherwise great season. Brown is convinced that she, like every athlete does at some point or another, simply had an off day. But unlike in other sports, runners can’t be benched for the second half if they’re underperforming.
As far as the reason for the Cats’ underwhelming showing, it’s still somewhat of a mystery, even to them.
“The only thing that I can attribute it to is that it was a very high-pressure atmosphere, and there was kind of this expectation to do so much better than we’ve done in the past,” King said. “But it definitely wasn’t an unattainable goal, and we should have been able to do it, and I have no doubt that we can do it. It was just a matter of things not coming together the way they should have.”
Disappointments aside, NU knew that anything more than a day or two of brooding could lead to problems with this Saturday’s NCAA Regional championships. Instead, the runners tried to move on and focus on the positives. The Cats are ranked 12th in the region, they’ve run well at this weekend’s course before (they placed third out of 17 in a meet there on Oct. 12), and King’s strong showing at Big Tens indicates she’s ready to once again be a leader on this team.
With Brown having moved on from the conference championship (as both she and coach April Likhite assure she has) and a resurgent King, NU looks to finish in at least the top 12 at Regionals.
“We had to make a choice: We could sulk and be disappointed, or we could move forward,” Likhite said. “And I feel like we’ve done (the latter).”
Reach Ben Larrison at [email protected].
