Harriers Dominate Ivy Championships

Freshmen Jenny Stricker and Kate Wiley finished one-two and led Harvard to a 24-68 triumph in Saturday's Ivy League Women's Cross Country Championships at Franklin Park.

Crimson harriers captured six of the first ten places, and no one in Harvard's 12-runner contingent crossed the finish line worse than 24th.

The team's performance confirmed its domination of the league this year, and coach John Babington said afterwards that his charges now have a "legitimate claim to being the strongest team ever in the Ivies."

Harvard's margin of victory was the largest in the Ivy meet's six-year history, ten points more than the Crimson's 1977 edge.

UPenn upset defending champion Princeton to take second, 68-77. Mary Turner led the Quakers with a sixth-place finish and a time of 17:29.

Stricker (16:58) turned in the fastest Franklin Park time ever for a Harvard woman. Wiley (17:05) led for most of the race, overtaking Stricker near the half-mile mark of the 3.1-mile course and holding the lead for about two miles. Stricker rallied on the final downhill stretch to overtake her teammate.

Defending champion Darlene Beckford (17:25) kept pace with Wiley and Stricker through the first half of the race and held on for fifth place. Freshman Kathy Good (17:31) finished seventh, and captain Kristin Linsley (17:44) took ninth to round out Harvard's scoring.

Good broke out of a personal slump with her best performance of the year. She shaved nine seconds from her previous best at Franklin Park.

Pre-race favorite Sally Straus of Yale missed the event because of a pulled groin muscle, and the Wiley-Stricker duo was never really challenged. "I couldn't really tell how fast I was going," Stricker said. "I'm used to having people pass me going uphill. Nobody did."

"They [Stricker and Wiley] haven't come up against anybody who has pushed them real hard at the start," Babington said, adding that he didn't give them specific instructions on where to make their move. "There wasn't a strategy to bide one's time and then hit it hard," he explained.

"Collectively, the plan was to run as a team and overwhelm the opposition, taking advantage of our superior knowledge of the course," the coach said.

Next week, Harvard travels to the Eastern Championships at Holy Cross, where the Crimson will compete for a berth at the AIAW National Championships.

"If they can match this kind of performance next week, I'd be very optimistic about them placing first in the Easterns," Babington said.

Yale coach Mark Young said Straus may be ready to confront Harvard's best in the Easterns.

Penn State and Vermont, two teams which might have challenged Harvard, will not compete at this year's Easterns because both have decided to compete in NCAA-sponsored championships.