The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
National Championship moments: 1986 Women's Cross Country
02.12.2007 | Track & Field / Cross Country w, Track & Field / Cross Country
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The drama built week by week for the 1986 University of Texas women's cross country team. The pieces fell into place with each meet. Through four regular season wins, its first outright Southwest Conference title and the eventual NCAA Championship, Texas steadily built a season of unprecedented success in the UT cross country annals.
With the nucleus from the 1985 squad returning -- a group which had propelled Texas to its first team finish in the NCAA competition (fifth overall) -- there was a justifiable optimism for success in the 1986 campaign. Optimism, that is, from everyone but the team's head coach. The ever cautious Terry Crawford refused to let preseason hype run away with her team.
"In track and field, an athlete with good form can go out and finesse her way through a race," she said prior to the season. "To be a good cross country runner though, you've got to have a tremendous amount of tenacity and will power, because you've just got to go out and power your way over the course."
Crawford instilled that competitive drive in her athletes. A trio of seniors who later would all repeat their All-America honors of 1985 -- Anne Schweitzer, Liz Natale and Sandy Blakeslee -- buoyed the team, while a number of up-and-comers like Karol Davidson, Tracy Laughlin and Laura McCloy, and a pair of transfers, Trina Leopold and Kelly Champagne, provided the awesome depth which would become the trademark of the Texas team.
"We stressed running as a team -- as a pack -- as close to the front as possible," Crawford said. "When a team has depth to run hard together, near the front, it's very hard too beat."
It didn't take Crawford's team long to pound its point home. The team's first win came in El Paso, when UT opened the season at the UTEP Invitational. In that meet, the Horns finished with 20 points -- a mere five points over the minimum -- to easily outdistance second place Houston, which finished with 74. Schweitzer (first), Blakeslee (second) and Leopold (fourth) all finished in the top five as Texas became the first repeat champion in the meet's four-year history.
Then came a win at home in the Longhorns' own Texas Invitational, which was followed the next week with UT's first win against a truly national field in the Arizona Invitational. Natale, Schweitzer, Blakeslee and Leopold took four of the top five places and Champagne finished close behind in 12th. That win began to lessen Crawford's pre-season worries.
Six days later, the then-second-ranked Horns won their final regular season challenge, upsetting top-ranked Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, to claim the nation's No. 1 ranking.
With a 4-0 season record behind them, the Longhorns went to Waco to defend the SWC title they shared with Houston. There was no question who the 1986 conference champions were as Texas went home with 23 points and a conference title all their own, far and ahead of second place Arkansas (54) and third-place Houston (70). All of Texas' runners placed in the top 20, including strong finishes from Champagne (eighth) Laughlin (13th) and Davidson (15th).
That order of finish was duplicated two weeks later in the NCAA Region VI Championships, with the Horns taking the title with 27 points and earning an automatic berth in the NCAA Championships. Interestingly, Texas won the SWC title while resting All-America Natale and the Regional Championship while resting All-America Schweitzer.
Everyone ran -- and ran well -- on November 24 when Texas won the NCAA Championship. "I knew we had a team capable of winning the national title, but I also knew we were in for an entirely different type of meet than anything we had run all year," said Crawford in retrospect. "We had to run the best race we ran all year in order to win."
Over the same University of Arizona course on which it had won earlier in the year, Texas placed Blakeslee (fifth), Natale (10th), Leopold (15th) and Schweitzer (19th) in the top 25. After the university team members' finishes were displaced, Texas came away with a two-point win, 62-64, over Wisconsin in the closest finish in the history of the NCAA Cross Country Championships.
