I went to Syracuse University, a basketball school that also played football and has a pretty decent journalism school.  When those seasons inevitably ended without satisfaction, we turned our attention to the one sport we dominated– lacrosse.  As far as I knew then, those were the only sports offered at Syracuse.

Apparently, I was wrong.  So wrong, I didn’t even know my alma mater had won a national championship in another sport until I found the news on Runnersworld.com while searching for my own feature article on the very same sport: cross country.   (Here’s my article, by the way.  It’s called Cross Country Romance and it’s about my deep abiding love for the sport, which I rediscovered by running my first race since before I even enrolled at Syracuse 35 years ago!).

So my congratulations are slightly belated, but very much in order to coach Chris Fox and the Orange for topping #1 ranked Colorado, the legendary program immortalized in one of running’s great books, Running With the Buffaloes. I have that book within arm’s reach as I write this and am thrilled to know that the Boys of Syracuse could go head-to-head with Coach Wetmore’s squad and win one for homegrown New York state runners like me.

Here’s the Runners Times article on the  historic victory, Syracuse’s first XC national championship in 64 years.