The Foot Locker curse is over and the New Mexico women dominated.
The Foot Locker curse is over and the New Mexico women dominated.
Syracuse is back on top of the NCAAs for the first time since 1951 while Edward Cheserek is back in the only place he knows- on top. Full recap with interviews of Chris Fox, Mark Wetmore, Justy Knight, Grant Fisher, Patrick Tiernan and more.
New Mexico and King Ches made history but Syracuse upset the apple cart. We break it all down.
Edward Cheserek and Molly Seidel were the winners, but who exceeded/came up short of expectations?
They were “out-Coloradoed" over the last 2K.
A week before NCAAs they were only third at IC4As, but peaked at the right time.
“Once they remove themselves and see what they’ve done, they should be proud of themselves. I know they don’t feel that way now, but they should and I want them to in the next couple of days.”
"I went into it thinking I'm going to have a chance to beat him. I gotta go out hard and try break him and that's what happened for three quarters of the race, but credit to him -- he beat me at my best game. I just tried to keep the pace going, you can't back off and let everyone else back into it. I just tried to keep it rolling and I think I did that pretty successfully. I was very proud of how I raced today."
They join the 2004 New Mexico ski team as the school's only other NCAA champions.
Chris Fox: "They ran like men. They took control at the beginning and never let it go. They put themselves in a dominant position and said come get me. It was an incredible day, if you were going to write it down before hand - to beat two-time defending National Champion Colorado when they have everyone back and have Stanford and Oregon go third and fourth, those are the names in our sport - it happened exactly how we'd have wanted it to. ... The day coach Bell and I got here in August 11 years ago we said we were here for one reason, and that's a National Championship. Thats the way we designed things. We said we're going to be relentless and we're not going to stop until we get it and it went great. It maybe took a bit longer than we thought, but it went according to plan."
Seidel and her coach talk about her transformation from injured freshman (who appeared to be yet another victim of "the Foot Locker curse") to two-time NCAA champion.
Seidel: “It’s tough when you’re in the (rehab) pool, day after day; getting beaten down every single day,” Seidel recalled. “There were a lot of times I considered (quitting) when it just hurt so badly – mentally and physically. I was wondering if I was ever going to get back to where I had been in high school. At one time, I fell out of running. It just wasn’t a positive experience anymore.”