TRACK ,NCAAs offer individual efforts Monday, June 8, 1998 - The Michigan Daily - 11 By Rick Freeman Daily Sports Editor BUFFALO, N.Y. -There's no ' in team, but there should be one in track, at least for Michigan. Michigan didn't really send a team to Buffalo, just a good- sized pack of athletes. There was no chance that Michigan could walk (or run) away with either the men's or the women's team title. In fact, the Wolverines finished 15th. This wasn't like Big Tens, where everyone cheers their team- nates in every race, with one eye on the team scores, Michigan distance runner Elizabeth Kampfe said. At NCAAs, the focus shifts to individual efforts. And what an individual effort Kampfe's was. Running in the last race on the first night of competition, in crisp, cold air that seemed more like October than June, only Michigan distance coach Mike McGuire and her parents watched her ninth-place performance in the 10,000-meter run in her first NCAA race - a race she said was "pretty boring to watch" McGuire didn't feel quite the same. "It was a good race," McGuire said. "She made an aggressive move between 6,000 and 7,000 meters; she kept the pack going." McGuire noted that the only people who stayed for Kampfe's race were "hard-core distance junkies." But if watching scattered individual performances isn't as exciting for the fans, what about for the athletes? Sure, their own races and the races of their teammates are exciting, but when your team's not on the scoreboard, compet- ing must be a little less fun. Right? "It's a different kind of fun," Kampfe said. "You watch how your performance influences the team" Tania Longe agreed. Longe said she gets more "psyched up" when her team is around. But with the only attention reserved for individual races, the excitement only comes in spurts. NCAAS Continued from Page 12 Om, but won All-America honors by virtue of being one of the top eight U.S. citizens in her race, the 10,000. When Sullivan fell, he picked him- self up almost before the crowd was finished gasping, and was just 50 meters behind the pack, he estimated. It must have seemed like miles. "I was just stunned more than any- thing," Sullivan said. He made it to the inish in 3:57.37, over 15 seconds ehind Seneca Lassiter, the runner from Arkansas who Sullivan nosed out at the finish of ,this year's indoor 1,500. He never considered giving up. "I've never dropped out of a race before, and I wasn't about to start here, Sullivan said. Sullivan's tumble came when the runner in front of him fell. "He just ran up on the guy in front of him," Sullivan said. And ran over Sullivan's dreams of ending his Michigan career on a high note. Michigan's best finish was second, by Mortimer in the 3,000 steeplechase and McGregor in the 5,000 run. In the steeplechase, Mortimer led near the end but was passed by defending champion Matt Kerr of Arkansas. McGregor never led her race, as Wrizona's Amy Skeiresz darted out to an early lead that grew as the race wore on. McGregor ran in third for most of the race and held off a surging pack, moving into second and chasing Skeiresz to the finish. "I never really gave up," McGregor said "At no point are you like 'I can never catch them."' Michigan's only field event partici- pant, Nicole Forrester, earned fourth in the high jump by clearing 6-foot-1/2 inch, equaling her jump in last year's championships. Tania Longe secured seventh place in the heptathlon with 5,364 points, using a strong surge in the final event, the 800. "I felt the pressure," Longe said. And she responded. Longe frowned her way through the first six events, - "I'm not happy with it at all," she said. But when she moved up a spot, to seventh, after the final event, she was all smiles. Longe said she usually saves her best performance in the heptathlon for Big Tens -as she did this year, too - but the effort usually leaves her too drained to place nationally. "I'm usually dead meat from Bi Tens," she said. Michigan's two sprinters at nation- als, Brian Theisen and Maria Brown, failed to qualify in the I110 hurdles an the 100 run, respectively. MEXICAN CAFE Ann Arbor's Finest Mexican Style Food! - Michigan's Largest Selection of Gourmet Hot Sauces & Salsasl WE DELIVER! Call 761-6650 'til 1 a m. Sun. - Tue til 3 a.m. Wed. - Sat. 333 E. Huron Offset printing Photocoes GUINNESS Continued from Page 12 concentration. 6:41: Athletes place hands behind starting line, stick butts in air. Crowd goes silent. 6:42: Starter calls "stand up" (Why not?) athletes jog down track, jump up and down some more. 6:44: Athletes go through routine again. Crowd again goes silent. 6:45: Starter fires pistol, athletes tear like heck for the finish line, everyone else jumps a foot, nearby photographers swallow camems. etc. 6:45:11.37: Race ends. And this happens in each of the approximately twelve bajillion heats for each of the 25 races. And then there are field events, in which athletes throw something incredibly heavy as far as they possibly can at least 73 times. Or they knock sticks off poles by jumping into them. Occasionally they miss completely and go right over the stick, but this is rare. No wonder this is being televised on CBS. But as I sat in the press box trying to figure out how to make Guinness come out of the soda fountain, I noticed some- thing. A runner, (I had no idea who she was) put every ounce of her being into the 100 meters she had to run. Her sole reason to exist at that moment was running. And Elizabeth Kampfe's ninth- place finish in the 10,000 meters was good enough for All-American honors. RsirKFREEMAN/Daily winning. Or, sometimes, they lost, like Stanford's TH IS GIRL in the 1,500. She collapsed at the finish; all she had left to give was hanging in gooey threads from her lips. The rest she left behind her on the track. I'll guess that Rick Reilly never saw that at an NBA game. And that's why, when a race finally gets underway, it's as riveting as anything you could want in a sport in which you've only heard of about 13 of the roughly 4,337 competitors. Now all I need is that Guiness ... 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