After the women’s cross country team took first at the Big Ten Championships last weekend, redshirt senior Leah O’Connor and head coach Walt Drenth were recognized by the Big Ten for Athlete of the Year and Coach of the Year honors on Wednesday.
O’Connor finished Sunday at the women’s Big Ten Championships, with her career-best and course-record 6K time of 19:26.30. During the second half, O’Connor was head-to-head with Wisconsin’s Sarah Disanza, but pushed through the last 200 meters. O’Connor beat Disanza by two seconds.
“It was a cool way to go out as a senior but first and foremost our goal was to go into that as a team and run our best individually so that as a team we had our best showing so far — that happened,” O’Connor said.
During his eight seasons at MSU, Drenth has coached the women’s team to four Big Ten Championship wins in the last five years. This is the second consecutive year he has received the honor and the fourth time in five years.
“However it would have turned out, it’s such a gratifying group to coach. We don’t talk about winning — you want to win, but our primary objective is to be our best,” Drenth said.
During the Big Ten Championships this weekend, sophomore Rachele Schulist followed behind O’Connor and Disanza, finishing third with a time of 19:54.4. Redshirt junior Lindsay Clark (19:59.7) and redshirt senior Julia Otwell (20:10.0) performed well, placing in the top ten as fourth and seventh, shortly behind O’Connor and Schulist.
“The whole group is doing incredibly well. If you think about it in context, we had 8 people in the top 18 — we nearly occupied 50 percent of the field,” Drenth said. “We’re a pretty good team.”
The women anticipated their top competitor to be Michigan, but two of their top runners did not run during the conference meet due to injury.
“The dynamic changed — we went in thinking it was going to be a battle with Michigan and it ended up being a battle with Wisconsin. That was pretty intense,” O’Connor said. “There was a huge pack of Wisconsin girls just kind of sitting on Rachele and I a lot of the race and it came down to the wire with another Wisconsin girl. They definitely had a strong showing that day. They tested us in a way we didn’t expect.”
Junior Caleb Rhynard led the men’s cross country team to their fifth place Big Ten title, finishing the 8K in 23:47.8 .
