University of Tennessee Athletics
University of Tennessee
NCAA Championships
Blaase Earns All-American Honors at NCAAs
November 22, 2014 | Track & Field
Nov. 22, 2014
Men's Results | Women's Results
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. -- Junior Chelsea Blaase capped an incredible junior season with All-America honors on Saturday at the 2014 NCAA Cross Country Championships, finishing in 10th place to become the women's program's 10th All-American and the first under first-year director of track and field/cross country Beth Alford-Sullivan.
"Chelsea was on a mission from the start of this year -- from the first time I met her, actually -- and she put it into motion today, which is a tremendous way to cap off a career season," said Sullivan. "The race was very competitive all the way through and she represented us great. I couldn't be more excited for her; she really ran one of the best-executed top 10 finishes I've ever seen."
After qualifying for the national championships for the first time in her career at last weekend's South Regional, Blaase traversed the 6,000 kilometer course in 20 minutes, 11.6 seconds to finish inside the top 10 for the seventh time in seven races this season. Her 10th place finish makes her the first women's runner from Tennessee to place inside the top 10 since Patty Wiegand was fifth back in 1989. With the top 40 runners in the race earning All-America honors, Blaase also becomes the first UT women's runner to grab All-America accolades since Sarah Bowman in 2008.
"I'm so happy," said Blaase of her All-American finish. "This is something I've been wanting for so long and I'm just so excited. I was a little nervous at the beginning of the race, but once I found the people I was supposed to be running with I gradually started moving my way up."
On the men's side, Tennessee senior Austin Whitelaw was unable to finish the race after sustaining an injury in the early stages. Whitelaw concludes his collegiate cross country career at his first-ever NCAA Championships and became the third Vol in the last three years to qualify for the final after finishing in seventh place at the South Regional last week.
"Austin had a tremendous senior campaign," Sullivan said. "He really pulled things together very, very well -- especially at the end of the year when he ran so well at the conference meet and qualified out of the regionals. It was an unfortunate event today, but we came away with some good feelings about Austin getting here before his career was over and the way he represented us this season."
"It was pretty crowded at the start and about a kilometer in there was a really muddy patch that I tried to get around, and going around the turn I got caught up in the crowd and slipped and threw my hip out of whack," Whitelaw said. "I tried to pull it in, but it just was a better idea to shut it all down. Still, this past season has been absolutely phenomenal and I couldn't have been happier to be at the NCAA meet. It really meant a lot to me to go out in my final race in the orange and the `Power T.'"
A native of St. Joseph, Illinois, Blaase's All-American honors come on the heels of a tremendous junior season in which she placed no worse than third in any of the six meets leading up to the NCAA Championships. She opened the year with three straight runner-up finishes before capturing the second individual title of her collegiate career when she took the gold at the Crimson Classic on Oct. 17. From there, Blaase turned in a career-best finish of third at the SEC Championships, posting a career-best 6K time of 19:32.37 in the process. That time would not hold for long as she again set a personal best at the 6K distance, finishing runner-up at the NCAA South Region Championships at 19:26.20 -- a time that made her the first female qualifier from UT since 2011.
"Words can't even describe what this means to me. Everything just kept rolling in a positive way and I was able to run well and I'm really happy with the end result," added Blaase. "It's everything I ever wanted and it felt really good to wear the orange and represent Tennessee."
With 85 points on the afternoon, the Michigan State women claimed the NCAA team title. The Spartans had entered the meet ranked atop the latest USTFCCCA rankings. Iowa State came in second with 147 points and defending national champion Providence was 13th at 401. Iona boasted the women's individual national champion in junior Kate Avery who finished in 19:31.6.
The top-ranked program on the men's side also took home the team title as No. 1 Colorado scored 65 points for their second consecutive national championship. The harriers from Stanford were runners-up at 98 points. Another repeat champion emerged in Edward Cheserek -- the Oregon sophomore whose 10K time of 30:19.4 gave him the national championship for the second year in a row.
