HAVERFORD, Pa. – A trip to the NCAA Championship is on the line this Saturday for the No. 35 Haverford College women's cross country team as the Fords will make the trek back to Center Valley, Pa. for the 2016 Mideast Region. The women's race will begin at 11 a.m. with the men to follow at 12 p.m.
The top two teams in the regional earn automatic bids to the NCAA Championship next weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. Individuals among the top seven runners not on the top two teams will also punch their tickets to the NCAA Championship. Sixteen at-large bids for those non-qualifying teams across the eight Division III regionals will be announced on Sunday.
Sixty teams are expected to compete at this weekend's regional championship with each allowed to enter a maximum of seven runners. The Fords are currently ranked fifth in the regional rankings. Johns Hopkins (No. 1 nationally), Dickinson (No. 9), DeSales (No. 25), and Elizabethtown (No. 29) are favored to vie for the automatic slots along with the nationally-ranked Fords. Haverford is coming off of a third place finish at the Centennial Conference Championship where the Fords lost to Dickinson by just eight points.
The top 35 runners in this race will earn all-region accolades. Katie Sullivan will look to repeat those honors as she placed ninth in the regional meet last year. A two-time first-team All-Centennial Conference runner, Sullivan is coming off a sixth place finish at the conference meet where she had a personal best time of 21:24.0
Nicole Giannetti also earned all-conference honors with her 13th place finish at the conference meet to go along with her scholar-athlete of the year recognition. Giannetti placed 43rd at the Mideast Regional last year, but is coming off a personal best time of 21:58.7 at the conference championship. Amelia Keyser-Gibson did earn All-Mideast Region honors last year with a 12th place finish. Her personal best time came at the 2015 NCAA Championship when she crossed the line in 21:54.
MaryKate Cavanaugh and Sarah Wade also have experience at the regional meet. Cavanaugh has consistently been the team's fourth finisher this year. She placed 152nd at the Mideast Regional last year and also set her personal best time at the 2016 conference championship with a time of 22:39.1. Wade was team's sixth finisher at the conference meet. With her time of 23:06.05, she too set a new personal best.
Abigail Doroshow has been a consistent scorer for the Fords this season and was the team's fifth finisher at the conference meet. She broke the 23 minute mark at the Paul Short Invitational. Alison Love was yet another runner who set a personal best mark at the conference meet two weeks ago as she finished in a time of 23:45.6.
Women's cross country has been to the NCAA Championship as a team 15 times in program history, including six of the past seven seasons. On nine other occasions, the team has qualified individuals to the national meet. Haverford has finished runner-up in this meet six times with the most recent runner-up finish coming in 2012.