In the highly anticipated rematch between the Grove City Wolverines and the Waynesburg University Yellow Jackets at the Presidents’ Athletic Conference Championships this past Saturday, Waynesburg repeated as PAC champions, defeating the Wolverines by 33 points.

The Wolverines had won the conference title for 27 consecutive years until a season ago. Now, the Yellow Jackets are the ones winning back-to-back titles.

Senior captain Angie Marchetti won the race for Waynesburg, and finished first in the entire race, with a time of 23:18. Closely behind Marchetti was junior Teghan Simonton in fourth place and senior Elinore Loch in fifth place.

Rounding out the top seven finishers for Waynesburg were senior Julie Gerber, sophomore Malarie Yoder, junior Elizabeth Trump and freshman Rebecca Volz, who all finished in the top 20 on the afternoon.

“It’s really hard to repeat,” said head coach Chris Hardie. “So I think going out and doing it was something I was really nervous about. But [the women] went out and really battled it.”

The women were projected to win the conference once again in the preseason poll before the start of the season, as voted on by the head cross country coaches from around the PAC, however even during the race Hardie wasn’t fully convinced his team would win for sure.

“I never ever really go into races like that,” said Hardie. “Last year, I think it became apparent pretty early on when we had so many girls up in the top seven. This year, visually, was different because our top pack was split up into kind of chunks. It wasn’t really until the finish line when I was kind of like ‘Ok, that was enough Waynesburg girls coming in and that was our [top] five and no other team had five come in at that point.’”

Despite the nerves throughout the race, Hardie can say that there was a certain moment in the race that showed him that his team would be able to repeat as champions for the 2017 season.

“A really defining moment for me was after the first loop when there were three girls up top… Angie [Marchetti], Teghan [Simonton] and Morgan Camerlo from Westminster,” said Hardie. “They went into the back woods section kind of together and then they were all three separated when they came out, and it was a really good move for Angie, she had then separated to the front at that point. That was pretty big.”

The pack running mentality, a distinct trait of the Waynesburg program, helped solidify the top 10 girls on the team by closing the gap between the top six runners and the next four or five. In the PAC championships, the spread between the team’s top seven runners was under 90 seconds, while the spread between the top 10 was nearly two minutes, which Hardie says helps show the depth of the team.

“The big goal that I presented coach Michelle [Cross] with during the first week of camp was that we had to close the gap between our six and seven [runners] however we could do that,” said Hardie. “I told her on the way home I was really proud of what she did, she really closed that gap to the point where there were 10 girls now that really closed that gap.”

The second consecutive title comes during the senior year of the class that Coach Hardie says changed the entire direction of the program, marking them a ‘game-changing class’ for the team.

“The year before this class, we lost by probably 30-50 points,” said Hardie. “And they single-handedly cut it to almost single digits that year. Right away this class just changed the way we did things. And then the leadership came through, that was the game changer for me, just how the mentality changed on both sides. We started to think and talk more about winning and what does it feel like to be out front.”

Gerber has been a force to be reckoned with in the conference ever since her freshmen year, making it to Nationals her sophomore year. Loch has also been a mainstay atop the Waynesburg scorers in recent years.

Marchetti, this year’s individual champion, had always performed highly for the Jackets, but had never won a collegiate race.

That all changed this past Saturday.

Marchetti had talked with Hardie about two weeks before the PAC championships about what her goals were for the meet. When she said she wanted to get top three in the race individually, Hardie she has the chance to win the entire race.

“I don’t want to say that I didn’t believe it,” said Marchetti. “Yeah I may have the fastest time at that moment [before PAC’s], but I could have just as easily come in, for example, 17th place at PAC’s.”

Once Marchetti and Simonton got about a half mile into the race, they both realized the other teams were pacing off them as their strategy to hang on until they would try to out kick them near the end of the race.

“We could tell almost right away they were pacing off us,” said Marchetti. “I think we handled it pretty well, we still did well pacing wise. Teghan and I didn’t panic, we just said ‘Ok, they’re just pacing off us, let’s just go,’ and raced it.”

As many women on the team will say, the depth of the program is incredibly deep. Marchetti is very thankful that both the coaches and her fellow teammates all invested heavily into making the dream of repeating as champions a reality.

“I’ve really proud of the team,” said Marchetti. “There’s no way we could of won without everyone doing their part. I think that’s something really important, and we had out coaches help us through that. We had strong, supporting coaches and a strong, supporting team and that’s why we had this success.”