We've got a lot of things to cover here, so let's ride.
First of all, no matter what's happening nationally, the first thing that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated is an event that took place in our own corner of the 202. For about a year now, AU has not had an athletic director, which is maybe good considering that when there was an athletic director, teams were cut from the budget.
Amidst the uncertainty, and with less money, facilities and perhaps most importantly, reputation than the big boys, the AU track and wrestling are like a one-handed boxer. With that said, what truly needs to be celebrated here is that this hasn't stopped them from knocking people out.
As members of the cross country team were interviewed by my sports journalism class, time and time again, runners spoke of the fact that even without an indoor track, or for many scholarship money, Coach Matt Centrowitz had convinced them to come to AU by flipping the script on another weakness.
Sure, the school might not have had a legacy of track excellence, but "that legacy could begin with us," one runner told us Centrowitz told him. It might sound corny or clich?, but maybe the simple fact is that when you believe, you can achieve. Centrowitz may have told our class that AU was the only Patriot League school without an indoor track, and that his team, even with the largest roster, had the least amount of money, but from his demeanor it seemed like Centrowitz had seen these factors to be more of an inconvenience than an excuse.
It is in this area that Centrowitz has done a brilliant job, conceptualizing races down to the most basic levels; by giving his runners confidence that they can simply beat whatever runner is on the line with them.
"I never feel like I'm an underdog," runner Dan Beardslee told the class. "I think every time I step on the line, I think I can win the race. It doesn't matter who's on the line or anything like that. That's just coach's mentality and the way coach's trained me and every other runner on this team," The results? This year's men's cross country team won the Patriot League championship for the fifth consecutive year, and despite being on the smaller schools competing in the 31 team field, the men also qualified for the NCAA Championships for the third consecutive year.
So now that we've talked about cross-country, let's talk about the story that landed AU on the first Washington Post's front page since the Ben Ladner scandal.
No, interim president Kerwin wasn't caught in a love triangle with a Russian mail order bride, but in fact something almost as unlikely happened. We now have a national champion!
The man you can thank for that is Josh Glenn, who on Saturday night defeated Kurt Backes, an all-American in the 197-pound division from the Iowa State wrestling powerhouse.
Now, my wrestling viewing experience has only been extended to "smelling what The Rock was cooking," but I would be remiss not to congratulate Glenn for his remarkable feat, and for, on a personal note allowing me to actually enjoy reading a sports section, which is indeed a tough feat these days as a D.C. native.
Props also to wrestling Coach Mark Cody, who like Centrowitz has made a "mountain out of a molehill, taking a program that had fallen off the map in the '90's and was threatened to be cut, to one that today, sees its wrestlers competing for championships.
