Team finishes 7th, runners advance

In the final race of an up and down season for the Hoosiers, the IU women's cross country team finished seventh in the Great Lakes Regional. Saturday's IU-hosted event exhibited elements of the team's highs and lows for the year, IU head coach Judy Wilson said.\n"I thought the lowest that we would place would be seventh," Wilson said. "The best we could have finished would have been third. With Larra (Overton) 100 percent and Kelly (Siefker) 100 percent, we certainly would have been third."\nAn injury to Overton's knee forced her to drop out of the race as fellow senior Siefker fought her way to the finish.\nThe Hoosiers did not finish in third behind Michigan and runner-up Notre Dame. Instead, Wisconsin, Butler University and Michigan State rounded out the top five.\nIU had several highlights amid adversity. IU's top three runners all finished in the top 25, led by Jessica Gall, who finished fifth with a time of 21:16:9. Lindsay Hattendorf finished in eighth in 21:19:2 and freshman Wendi Robinson placed 22nd with a time of 21:50:9. \n"I am really excited for Jessica and Lindsay. Jess really needed this going into the national meet and Lindsay has just been solid for us the last few meets," Wilson said. "I told Wendi right before the race to shoot for a top-25 finish. She is that gutsy type of kid to go out there and get it done."\nThanks to their top ten performances, both Gall and Hattendorf will be moving on to Terre Haute for nationals Nov. 21. The top four runners from teams that did not qualify automatically go to nationals. Michigan and Notre Dame's top runners will receive their teams' automatic bids and will not take up any valuable bids, assuring the Hoosiers two national berths.\nAlthough they finished within three seconds of each other, Hattendorf and Gall took two very different approaches to the finish line. Hattendorf ran much of the race in a pack behind frontrunner Victoria Mitchell of Butler, who won the race in 20:37. Unlike her teammate, Gall chose to lay back and spent much of her day working her way up to the front. At the final straightway, the paths of the runners met in a battle to the finish.\n"I'm the type of racer who likes to be out front and just hang on for dear life," Hattendorf said. "I knew the course like the back of my hand and I knew that some of them would fall off and some of them would keep going and I knew I'd be able to reel some of them in at the same time."\nJessica Gall, on the other hand, is the type of runner who prefers to hang back and sprint at the last minute.\n"I probably should have started making my move a little bit earlier, but it worked out in the end," Gall said. "The last past hurt because I was pretty far behind and had to catch up"