Last year, the men's cross country team entered NESCAC's with the unfamiliar tag of "favorite," despite having never won a NESCAC Championship in Tufts history. This year, the squad once again enters the meet with a new label: defending champion.
Almost one year after Tufts won its first ever NESCAC Championship at Middlebury, the Jumbos will try to do it again at Colby on Saturday.
Senior co-captains Nate Brigham and Brian McNamara, fifth-year senior Peter Bromka, juniors Matt Fortin, Matt Lacey, and Kyle Doran, and sophomore Josh Kennedy will represent Tufts' top seven. However, the team can race twelve in NESCAC's, so senior Mike Don, juniors Neil Orfield and Mike Cummings, sophomore Justin Chung, and freshman Chris Kantos will also probably line up for the Jumbos. The squad will depart for Maine tomorrow and stay in a hotel overnight.
Last year, Kennedy, Brigham, Doran, McNamara, and Orfield finished seventh through tenth overall to give the Jumbos their first NESCAC title. Everyone who ran in that race last year will run it again.
"You look at all the guys who ran last year when we run, and we return all of them, so we should win again," McNamara said.
"Statistically, if we can get all our guys to run together at the front of the pack like last year, things should take care of themselves," coach Connie Putnam said. "Mathemati-cally, that would be a tough scenario to lose."
Last year, winning NESCAC's was one of several major goals for the Jumbos. Perhaps the biggest sign of how far Putnam's runners have come and how high their sights are set is that this year they view NESCAC's merely as a point along the way in their season.
"The team's at a level where our number one priority is Nationals; getting there and doing well," McNamara said. "And that shows how successful we are that we're to that point where we expect to be there, we will be there, and that's what we're aiming for."
"It's a step along the way for us," Brigham said of the league championship. "It was great to win the first one last year, and it would be great to win the second one. But we also know it's a tune-up for what's to come."
Still, this is the beginning of the team's championship portion of its season. It wants to win, but will have some competition in doing so.
"All of these other teams like Williams and Bowdoin and Bates have had very successful teams, both now and in the past," McNamara said. "And to be able to say that we're part of a Tufts team that has beaten those teams, part of a team that has won NESCAC's, [having] accomplished something like that and contributed to the Tufts community is a neat thing."
In the latest national poll, Tufts was ranked fifth in Div. III, while Bates was ninth and Williams was 16th. Bates has won every Div. III meet it has raced this year, although it finished 12th to Tufts' sixth place at All-New England's three weekends ago. Last year at NESCAC's, Tufts edged out Williams, which boasted the top two individual finishers, 48-57.
"We're definitely favored to win," McNamara said. "We expect to win. We know that there are some other good teams out there, and we just have to beat them."
"If we run our race and we run close together like we do in the workouts, then I don't think that there is anyone that can beat us in New England," Brigham said.
Brigham believes that will hold true not only on Saturday but on Nov. 13, when Tufts tries to qualify for the national championship race. In between, the squad's second seven will run at Tufts in the ECAC Championship next weekend.
"The next four weeks are going to be the defining moments for this team," McNamara said. "We've been talking about this season since about five minutes after we crossed the line at Nationals last year. Everyone knows this is where we have a chance to really shine and make a mark."
"The guys are definitely geared up," Putnam said. "They know it's really race time now."
