Regis Sports Information recently sat down with women's cross country head coach Kourtney Bonsey and junior captain Molly Curtin (Brockton, Mass.) to talk about the team's success in the early stages of their season. Curtin has led the Pride to an already historic season, winning New England Collegiate Conference Runner of the Week honors three times and making life easy for her first-year head coach.
R: You've been very successful so far this year. What did you do differently to prepare for this season versus last season?
MC: Over the summer I definitely trained a lot. I did higher mileage than last summer - definitely incorporated weight training too, which I think helped me. And also yoga, I think that gave me a little bit of an edge.
R: Yoga? How do you think that helped you?
MC: I think it honestly helped me open up my hips and just be overall more flexible, which leads to faster running. It's pretty common (among cross country runners).
R: Cross country is very much an individual sport, but at the same time also a very team-oriented sport. How does your team help support you and how have they contributed to your success so far this season?
MC: Two of my teammates, Maddie Boucias (Buckland, Mass.) and Siobhan McLaughlin (Derry, N.H.), they've been very close to me. During hard workouts, we really push each other. If someone's having a rough day:"Come on, let's go, we got this." The rest of the team is just really close and always has a positive attitude no matter what happened in their day.
R: You're a junior now, so you've got one year left, but what do have hope to achieve here at Regis before you graduate?
MC: I'm definitely hoping to win the conference with my team. That would be history for Regis - it's never happened before. That would be something that would be amazing. I think we have high potential this season to achieve that.
R: And what about after college?
MC: After college I definitely want to continue running, I don't know, maybe for a club. I definitely want to keep running though. I'm also a nuclear medicine major, so I'd like to continue with that.
R: Molly is having one of her biggest years so far here at Regis. Talk about how important she is to the team right now.
KB: She's of huge importance. She's actually one of our captains. The biggest thing with Molly is that she is such a good model for the team. She works so hard, which is a huge part of our success and everything that she does - I think she doesn't even realize it - has an impression on the whole team. Not even just the new freshmen, but everyone around her. Obviously she's our No. 1, but she's much more than that. She's the whole student-athlete.
R: We're talking here about Molly, but as much as cross country is an individual sport, it's also a team sport. How does Molly fit into the team?
KB: One of the biggest things that (assistant coach Kevin Greene) stressed to the team this season is running as a team, focusing on the team aspect. I think Molly and the rest of the women's team has really taken that culture and created it and worked with it. Molly trains mostly with Maddie, a freshman, and Siobhan, a senior - they're our top three right now - and they train together in every workout, they go on every run together. It's a huge part of Molly's success and the whole team's success. Even in races, we've kind of strategized with our earlier meets: everyone work together for the first mile, and then you can kind of branch out and run faster if you want. I think it's so important for them to have that and be able to work with each other and they know each other so well from practicing together.
R: When Molly was a freshman, you were a graduate assistant coach, but now that she's a junior, you're the head coach. Talk about how you're seeing her in a new light and how she's improved since you first worked with her.
KB: It's pretty cool because I was part of the recruiting process with Molly when Dan Flynn was the head coach, so it kind of started there. Her coming in as a freshman, she had been a pretty strong high school athlete. Unfortunately in her freshman cross country season, she got a stress fracture that kind of set her back. But then I took over for the indoor and outdoor (track) season with the women's distance group and worked on getting Molly healthy. She improved a good amount her freshman year, but nothing like what she's running now, so it's really cool to see her success now. I've talked to her a little bit about, you know, what's been clicking, what's working now. She kind of talked a little bit about, you know, she was just getting over different things. You know, being a freshman and acclimating to the training of colleges can be so different. And then sophomore year she was figuring things out and started to improve last spring and I think again, what's kind of helped her is her commitment to the sport. She's so committed. She put in a ton of miles this season. Everything just kind of clicked with her is kind of how I express it.
R: The times your team has put up so far this season have been impressive and historic for Regis. Talk about what having times like that means to your program.
KB: Molly was pretty consistently a 20-minute girl, a 21-minute girl - which is pretty good for Division III, especially in the NECC, (where) 20 minutes will put you in the top-10, but this season she's gotten down to 19:17. To put it in perspective, that's a 6:12 pace per mile. So think about running a six-minute mile for three miles, a little over that. It's pretty quick, it's really fast. The winning time at the conference last year for women was 19:48. Again, courses vary, but Molly has done really well and is on track to continue to improve.