In three years, Liz Cufari hasn’t seen Meghan Rowcliffe in a bad mood.

Rowcliffe, a junior on SU’s cross country team, fills the requisite role of the positive attitude on the Orange. But on the field, Rowcliffe takes on a different attitude.

‘Meghan is fairly relentless,’ said SU head coach Chris Fox. ‘She’s relentless in her racing and training.’

But cross country wasn’t her first choice. Rowcliffe once had the positive attitude and relentless demeanor on the soccer field.

‘I was on the soccer team in high school,’ Rowcliffe said. ‘The track coach recruited me because he said I would be good at cross country.’

The coach was right.

Rowcliffe and the SU cross country team will look to improve on its early season success Saturday at the National Open at Penn State.

Rowcliffe is only starting to reap the benefits of her move to cross country.

After being recruited by Cornell, Boston College and Princeton, she chose Syracuse because it was close to home.

Her freshman year, though, did not go as well as she would have liked.

‘Freshman year, I wasn’t happy with it,’ Rowcliffe said. ‘But when Fox came I started to really like cross country and track, and I was more successful.’

Fox’s tutelage showed at the NCAA Regional last year, where Rowcliffe finished third on the team. She admits she was out of shape at the beginning of the season, but the regional finish shows she ran herself back into shape.

This season, though, she has been up-and-down in two meets. Fox said Rowcliffe was ‘impressive’ at Colgate’s Harry Lang Invitational, although it was a ‘B’ meet. Rowcliffe took 25th out of 32 racers at the Hawkeye Open at Iowa with the top racing team.

Cufari thought the Rowcliffe’s strong Colgate performance convinced the team to bring Rowcliffe to Iowa.

‘Meghan was our top girl in the (Colgate) race and that was probably was one her best races,’ Cufari said. ‘She knew she had to do something to go to the next race, and she really stepped up for the team. It shows how competitive she is and she wants to be the best she can.’

Cufari believes this is an important quality to have in cross country.

‘It’s very useful when you are on the track,’ Cufari said. ‘So if coach tells her to do something, she’s going to work as hard as she can to achieve that goal of whatever it is that coach told her to do.’

But as relentless as she is on the field, Rowcliffe provides a calming presence to the team. Despite this, Fox still expects a lot from the junior.

‘I think she has a lot of potential that she has not realized yet, just because we’re probably asking her to do more than she’s ever done in her running career before,’ Fox said. ‘I think she’s hanging around eight, ninth, 10th man and she can do a little better than that.’

Published on October 4, 2006 at 12:00 pm