Badgers Set for Big Ten Championship
October 27, 2006 | Men's Cross Country
The No.1 ranked University of Wisconsin men's cross country team heads to Bloomington, Ind. for the 2006 Big Ten Conference Championships Sunday. The Badgers will run at 11:15 a.m. on the IU Golf Course.
Wisconsin will look to tie a Big Ten record with its eighth consecutive conference title, a mark the Badgers set between 1985 and 1992.
While the Badgers are the favorite for the title, they will field a young team this season, with six of the Badgers' top nine runners being freshmen or sophomores. Schumacher talked about the pressure facing his less experienced runners.
'The pressure's on and I tried to, as much as I can, try to put some pressure situations on them, but there's nothing quite like when you line up and you really put the heat on them to let them know that this is important, to see how they respond in that type of environment,' Schumacher said. 'They're excited about that challenge. So that's been a big plus.'
Wisconsin returns the top five finishers from last season's meet in seniors Chris Solinsky and Tim Nelson and sophomores Matt Withrow, Stu Eagon and Christian Wagner.
This season the Badgers will face three top 20 challengers for the title. Minnesota enters ranked 14th in the latest USTFCCCA poll, followed by No. 17 Iowa and No. 18 Michigan, who finished third and fourth in the championship meet last season, respectively.
In 2005, Senior Simon Bairu led the way for Wisconsin, capturing his third straight individual title in a time of 23 minutes, 31.73 seconds. Bairu was the first UW runner to win the Big Ten individual title three consecutive years and joined Tim Hacker as the only three-time champs for UW.
Solinsky (Stevens Point, Wis.) came in second for the second straight year, crossing the finish line at 23:56.38. Withrow (Tinley Park, Ill.) was third at 24:06.58 and Eagon (Portland, Ore.) was fourth with a time of 24:07.08. Senior Antony Ford also scored for the Badgers, coming in sixth overall at 24:24.63.
Wagner (Columbus, Ind.) was sixth on the squad and seventh overall with a time of 24:26.23, Nelson (Palo Cedro, Calif.) clocked in at 24:27.28 to place eighth.
As a team, Wisconsin scored just 16 points and posted an 85-point margin of victory, both Big Ten records.
After Bairu's three-year reign atop the Big Ten, this season Solinsky will look for his first individual championship, a feat a Wisconsin harrier has accomplished seven of the last eight years.
'Last year (Solinsky) was third, obviously behind two very good athletes and one of them being Simon Bairu, who really never let Chris get a sniff at anything during the cross country season,' head coach Jerry Schumacher said. 'I think Chris knows what he has to do and he's been preparing very effectively and I think he's going to have a great run here in the last three weeks.
For complete results of the 2006 Big Ten Cross Country Championships, check back to uwbadgers.com.
