{"id":3306,"date":"2014-11-13T15:39:19","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T20:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/2016\/02\/17\/paladins-run-the-show-2\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T18:22:43","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T23:22:43","slug":"paladins-run-the-show-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/paladins-run-the-show-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Paladins run the show"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"15249965255_dd90726dda_k\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cate Pichon Fenster \u201993 remains the only Furman runner to ever compete in the NCAA cross country championship meet, a feat she pulled off in 1991. There is a very good chance that will finally change this weekend.<\/p>\n

Fresh off their second straight Southern Conference titles, the Paladin men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams will compete in the Southeast Regional Championships on Nov. 14 in Louisville, Ky. There are nine regional meets, and the top two finishers in each earn automatic bids to the NCAA Championships to be held Nov. 22 in Terre Haute, Ind. Thirteen schools also receive at-large bids.<\/p>\n

The men, who until last year hadn\u2019t even won the conference since 1976, are seeded first, and third-year coach Robert Gary doesn\u2019t mince words about his team\u2019s chances of making Furman history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we need to have a crazy, miracle race by any stretch. If we run as well as we have I think the men\u2019s program will make it,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, it\u2019s tough. We\u2019re just a really young team. A lot of the freshmen at some of the bigger schools redshirt, and we didn\u2019t do any of that. If you\u2019re here it\u2019s time to get going. That\u2019s about the only thing we\u2019re worried about is how young they are and the distance moving from 8K to 10K.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the Paladins\u2019 performance at the SoCon meet held on Halloween in Kernersville, N.C., is any indication, he has good reason to be confident. Furman became the first school to ever win back-to-back men\u2019s and women\u2019s Southern Conference championship simultaneously, but the real story was the Paladins\u2019 record-breaking dominance. The women posted the lowest score in the 29-year history of the competiton with 22 points, and amazingly the men were even better with a perfect 15 points that resulted from sweeping the top five individual finishers.<\/p>\n

No Southern Conference men\u2019s team had done that since East Tennessee State\u2019s three-year run of perfection from 1980-82, which matched William & Mary\u2019s trio of 15s posted from 1972-74, and Furman set a mind-boggling record that can never be broken when its nine individuals beat every other runner from every other school.<\/p>\n

Senior Tripp Hurt led the way by becoming Furman\u2019s first male individual conference champion since Dennis Patterson in 1962, crossing the line in 24:18.63 to cap a career that saw his league meet finishes improve from 12th to seventh to fourth last year. The SoCon Runner of the Year, who was also named first-team all-conference for the third straight season, was followed by 2013 SoCon Freshman of the Year Troy Reeder (24:18.83), 2014 SoCon Freshman of the Year Aaron Templeton (24:18.88), sophomore Tanner Hinkle (24:18.92) and sophomore Brock Baker (24:23.56).<\/p>\n

Freshmen Frank Lara (24:25.05) and Austin Sprague (24:31.32) nabbed the final two first-team slots, with senior William Ivey (24:35.28) and freshman Mark Hadley coming in eighth and ninth to garner second-team All-SoCon accolades.<\/p>\n

On the women\u2019s side, sophomore Allie Buchalski took the women\u2019s individual title with a time of 16:44.42 a year after finishing second to become Furman\u2019s first winner since Megan Lordi in 2008. The Paladins claimed three of the top five spots and six of the top 10, with senior Sinead Haughey coming in second with a time of 16:45.76 followed by sophomore Julia Rodriguez (fourth), 2014 SoCon Freshman of the Year Emma Mashburn (seventh) and sophomores Grace Tinkey (eighth), Laura Miller (ninth), Maddie Wolfe (21st) and Bryce Seymour (31st).<\/p>\n

The Paladin men earned the first national ranking in program history when they finished second at the Virginia\/Panorama Farms Invitational on Sept. 26 in Charlottesville, Va., and they finished fourth at the Pre-NCAA Invite on Oct. 18 in Terre Haute behind top-ranked Colorado, second-ranked Oregon and Georgetown. Furman has climbed to 16th nationally and first in the Southeast Region. The women are ranked ninth in the region.<\/p>\n

Gary was SoCon Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season.
\n\u201cThe women would be a little bit of a long shot to make the national meet, but the men, just going on a piece of paper, we probably should so that\u2019s pretty exciting,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel like a whole heckuva a lot of pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

An influx of money from the Blue Shoes program has rejuvenated the long-underfunded sport at Furman, and Gary hopes the Paladin community, which sees few and far between NCAA championships, will start to take notice.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I think at Furman for some reason athletics is kind of tip-toeing around and hoping nobody notices as opposed to hey, there\u2019s something really great going here,\u201d Gary, a two-time Olympian who came to Furman from Ohio State, said. \u201cWhen we came home from the SoCon, a bunch of the sports had come out to meet us, we had a police escort, President (Elizabeth) Davis came out to congratulate us, so those kind of things are really great. And I hope to set a tradition where we expect to win the SoCon and I hope we except to make the national meet every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Gary has no plans to stop there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen it\u2019s just a matter of can you get a trophy, and that\u2019s our ultimate goal inside the next four years. You get a trophy for top four at the NCAA meet, so having both genders shooting towards that will be really exciting,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s only a handful of schools that really talk about that on a yearly basis, only five or six out of the 350 cross country programs in the country. \u2026 In that little nerdy track-and-field world, there\u2019s a lot of buzz and a lot of people are really taking notice that a small liberal-arts school in South Carolina is a player on the national scene on the men\u2019s side and soon to be the women\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurt was also the Southern Conference Cross County Runner of the Month for September, and he and Buchalski were the SoCon Cross County Athletes of the Month for October.
\nFurman\u2019s 2013 women\u2019s team title broke a 13-year drought. They notched their first three championships in 1993, \u201994 and \u201995 behind three-time individual champion Heather VandeBrake Hunt \u201996 and added another in 2000. The men also won in 1961 and 1965.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fresh off their second straight Southern Conference titles, the Paladin men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams will compete in the Southeast Regional Championships on Nov. 14 in Louisville, Ky. There are nine regional meets, and the top two finishers in each earn automatic bids to the NCAA Championships to be held Nov. 22 in Terre Haute, Ind. Thirteen schools also receive at-large bids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":14043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpressmu-1266771-5793343.cloudwaysapps.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}