Glory Days: Mercy XC prepares to make final run
This fall will be the 40th that the Ohio High School Athletic Association has sanctioned girls cross country competition.
It will be the 37th that the Girls Greater Cincinnati League has sponsored the sport, and no GGCL team has been more successful than Mother of Mercy.
The Bobcats are going into their final season of competition before the school merges with McAuley next year, and they leave an impressive legacy.
The Westwood school has produced 11 league champions, more than any other school, but they didn’t stop there, long-time coach Scott Ridder points out in an email.
“We finished in the top five at districts for 31 straight years,” said Ridder, who spent four seasons as Bobcat assistant coach and the next 20 as the head coach. “Almost every year, the top four teams advance to regionals. A few times, it has been top five. We qualified to regionals 24 out of 31 years, and the seven times we didn't make it, we were always the next best team. There is no other team in greater Cincinnati that accomplished this. We also had a streak of 26 straight top-three finishes at league, which ended in 2015.
“We accomplished this at relatively small Division I school – just under 500 girls – competing against schools with 1,200-1,500 girls.”
Those accomplishments are scheduled to be celebrated at an alumnae race Aug. 12 at Rapid Run Park, followed by a reunion event at the school that evening to celebrate 36 years of running Bobcats.
The Bobcats got off to a slow start when the GGCL started sponsoring cross country competition in 1981-1982 school year. McAuley won the first six league championships and Mount Notre Dame and Ursuline each won one before Mercy captured the first of three straight in 1989. The Bobcats endured another slump, going 12 years without a title before winning two in a row in 2013 and 2014.
Mercy’s program already had established a solid base before individual runners started to stand out. The first was 2005 graduate Ellen Knopf, who set the school course record and became in 2003 the first Bobcat to qualify for the state meet. She qualified again the next year and finished 12th as the lead runner for the only Mercy team to qualify as a unit for the state meet.The team placed sixth. Knopf was named All-Ohio and Academic All Ohioan and ran for two years at the University of Cincinnati before returning to Mercy as an assistant cross country and track coach. She was inducted into Mercy’s Hall of Fame this past January.
“Sometimes, it seems like it went by so fast,” said Knopf, now a physical therapist at an Indianapolis skilled nursing facility and engaged to be married in April. “My best memory is definitely my senior year when the team qualified for state for the first and only time. It was such an exciting time at regionals when we found out we were runners-up. I had gone by myself the year before, and having teammates with me was so much better. It was nice to have my teammates by my side. It was very exciting. We were so proud.”
Knopf gives credit for her junior and senior year successes to Ridder, whom she said instilled in her the discipline of putting in the mileage every day.
“You had to be consistent at getting up every day for the morning training runs and working hard – putting in the miles,” said Knopf, who didn’t start running seriously until trying out for the cross country team as a freshman at the suggestion of her mother, Seton graduate Sue. “I think I ran more miles those two years than at any time. We were focused on getting the miles in. You can’t miss a day. It was very important to be there every day.”
Katie Lenahan was Knopf’s teammate on the state-qualifying team and qualified for state as an individual in 2006. She placed third and fourth at state in the 800-meter run in track and went on to have a strong career in cross country and track at Miami University. She is now one of the top local road racers in Cincinnati. She has won the Queen Bee Marathon several times and was runner-up in this spring’s Flying Pig Half Marathon. She has won Mercy’s alumnae race seven times.
Emma Hatch, a 2014 graduate, currently holds the school record at 18:08 and has the program’s highest state finish, placing fifth in 2013. She is the only Mercy runner to qualify for state three consecutive seasons and was a district champion in 2013. She was team captain her junior and senior years. She was named All-Ohio and Academic All-Ohio and was a National Merit Commended student.
She is a rising senior at Loyola University in Chicago and was the Missouri Valley Conference champion in the 10,000 meters in track this past spring. Both of her parents were UC’s top runners in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Her mother is an assistant cross country coach and head track coach at Mercy and her father is an assistant track coach. Her younger sister just graduated from Mercy. She was a varsity cross country runner and placed ninth at state in the 800 this past spring.
“Our girls were mostly just average kids with no running experience who loved each other and who cared very deeply about their school and the cross country program,” Ridder said. “They just worked very hard to keep that tradition alive and perform when it mattered.”
Editor's note: The team placed top five at districts (not regionals) for 31 straight years. This has been corrected from an earlier version.