The all-time collegiate/amateur record at Van Cortlandt, for all the zillions of races run there, is held by an Ivy athlete, the Penn legend Dave Merrick in a (gulp) 23:51, run waaay back in 1976.
At NCAA's this year the Heptagonal Games Association did very well. Once you get past the big $$$ big name conferences, the Heps guys were pretty much the best in points per school. This was boosted because many of the Heps athletes (Harris, Burley, Simmons) placed very high in their respective events.
Southeastern 41.04
Pac-10 28.80
Big XII 17.88
Atlantic Coast 11.89
Big Ten 9.68
Western Athletic 9.25
Heptagonals 5.44
Big Sky 4.88
Big East 4.14
A little while back someone mentioned putting the Heps teams in DIII. It would be a bloodbath lining up Penn and Princeton against those DIII schools on the track, ditto Dartmouth in cross.
Some caution:
Paul Morrison, an extremely gifted Canadian distance runner for Princeton who dominated the league, having been injured for quite some time, left the school for UTexas. Many of Princeton's best distance runners don't run all three seasons (this year Ryan Teising mysteriously was absent), and others have quit early on (Josh Palazola) because they didn't like the team dynamic. Make sure you like Princeton before you accept.
A friend of mine who was one Brown's best athletes in the late 1990's was very, very disappointed in the coaching and said they have tons of talent to win Heps but never do because of . . . coaching. At least on the track, Brown has gone downhill at the championships in the last few years. He also found the academics to be fairly easy too.
Meanwhile McArdle has really bumped Dartmouth back up to the prominence it once had, even without the Dave Chalmers thing on mensracing. Just be ready to be snowbound in a very small town. This whole thing makes me laugh because Tom went to my arch-rival high school and was essentially the understudy for two other athletes, Jon Riley and Matt Hebert (who washed out at where ? Princeton).
The Cornell head coach, Nathan Taylor, is a former Penn assistant and is very, very good at the technical events and sprints, but not as much in the mid-distance and distance, which is why I'm guessing they hired RoJo.
Have to point it out, but the Cornell coach as previously mentioned is a former Penn coach, the head Columbia assistant is a former Penn coach, the head Yale assistant is a former Penn athlete, and Fred Samara at Princeton is a Penn athlete too.
back to the original topic,
Dartmouth is in the country, Brown is in the city. Dartmouth is quite a bit smaller too. These are very different schools . . . why these two out of the 8 Ivies ?