the Rice Thresher

Issue date: 11/21/08 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Courtesy University of Memphis Sports Information Junior Nicole Mericle leads the pack during the C-USA Championships at the University of Memphis on Nov. 7. She helped the Owls finish second overall at regionals and qualify for nationals the second year in a row.

Running cross-country is a lot like playing poker: Doing well requires practice and skill, but they both require a little bit of luck.

Last Saturday at the NCAA South-Central Regional meet, all of these elements came together for the women's cross-country team perhaps for the first time all season. Not only did the team compete in peak shape, but they also ran without anyone on the team battling illness or injury.

"We've never been 100 percent healthy [until] now," head coach Jim Bevan said. "Health is always an underlying factor. You've got to deal with that one little element of being a human being. There are mortal obstacles we all have to go through. Some of it was we're lucky, and we're healthy now, but some of it was by design. You want to be your best at the end of the year."

Junior Nicole Mericle, however, ran so well that she probably did not need any luck. Mericle won the race, marking the first time any Rice runner has ever won a regional meet. Additionally, Mericle ran the fastest 6K race in Rice women's cross-country history with a time of 20:34. With eighth and ninth place finishes from sophomore Allison Pye and senior Lennie Waite, and 17th and 27th place finishes from sophomores Britany Williams and Becky Wade to boot, Rice took second place overall in the meet. The Owls automatically qualified for national competition behind the University of Arkansas, the Southeastern Conference champions.

Bevan said he was very pleased with team's performance.

"We had the best performance of the year, which I was anticipating," Bevan said. "I really felt good going into the race that we were going to have our best race."

However, Rice was tied with Baylor University purely on scores and finishes. The tiebreaker, which requires comparing each runner head-to-head on each team (i.e. the top runner from Rice's time with the top runner from Baylor's time, and so on), came out in Rice's favor, aided greatly by Rice's fourth-place runner, Williams, who finished nine seconds ahead of Baylor's fifth-place runner.

Continued...

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