The Muhlenberg men’s cross country team equaled its best finish at the NCAA Mideast Regional, coming in fourth out of 39 complete teams. The women’s team was 10th out of 41 squads.

The Mule men, who also placed fourth in 2002, have a chance at receiving an at-large bid to the

Chorney improved his time 17 seconds from when the Mules ran at Waynesburg in mid-September.

NCAA Championships, which are scheduled for next Saturday at Wilmington (Ohio) College. The top two teams in each of the eight NCAA regions qualify automatically, and the remaining 16 berths (announced Sunday) are chosen from among the teams that finish third through fifth.

Muhlenberg fared extremely well in two of the published selection criteria, late-season performance and gap times amongst runners at regionals. In their last four meets the Mules were second, first, second and fourth, and their spread at the Mideast Regional was 41 seconds, the best in the meet.

Four Muhlenberg runners earned all-region honors by placing in the top 35: seniors Stephen Rothwell (23rd) and Tim Seeley (30th) and sophomores David Chorney (27th) and Timothy Van Syckle (35th). Rothwell missed qualifying individually for the NCAAs by four places.

The women returned to the top 10 after finishing ninth in 2004 but dipping to 11th last year. To do so, the Mules held off Gettysburg, a team that beat them by 10 points at the Centennial Conference Championships two weeks ago.

Muhlenberg actually tied Carnegie Mellon for ninth place, but came in 10th on the sixth-runner tiebreaker. The Mules were just one point ahead of Gettysburg and would have lost the tiebreaker to finish out of the top 10 had junior Laura Clinton not overtaken a DeSales runner she trailed for most of the race at the end to finish in 107th place.

Junior Sara Gearin was the Mules’ top runner, in 46th place, and sophomore Laura Lipari came in 49th, 16 spots ahead of her Gettysburg counterpart. Junior Christy Goff, Muhlenberg’s fourth runner, also scored key points when she came in 80th, three places in front of a Gettysburg runner who led her by 16 seconds at the 2-mile mark.

Both Muhlenberg teams finished well ahead of Moravian at the regional meet. Combined with the football win, that gave Muhlenberg a 6-1 lead in the Matte Award standings for the 2006-07 year.

Click here for complete men’s results.
Click here for complete women’s results.
Click here for Muhlenberg box score.