Joe Whelan has been running some of the best races of his career. The sophomore’s hard work and dedication to cross country is beginning to pay off at Syracuse.

And with just one race left to go before the men’s team runs at the Big East championship in Louisville, Ky., on Oct. 29, Whelan’s looking for it to pay off on a greater stage.

‘Joe is a really, really great high school runner, so we have high expectations for him,’ head coach Chris Fox said. ‘We expect him to be the next Pat Dupont or Tito Medrano. He needs to be in our top five, and he needs to be a scorer.’

Whelan, a 2008 Foot Locker finalist at Hamburg (N.Y.) High School, has shown his value by finishing in the top five for SU in all three of the races that he has participated in this season. He said he is excited for the challenge of garnering another title in two weeks, but he is using the John Reif Memorial race on Saturday in Ithaca as a final tune-up.

While Whelan’s been successful, the two-time defending conference champion men’s team as a whole has been in a slump. But this weekend’s race is an opportunity to gain some momentum before the high-stakes conference championship.

And, as Whelan said, the struggles that are happening now do not need to have a greater effect on Syracuse’s results for the season.

‘We’re always looking towards the end of the season, championship season, because that’s when the best performances are,’ Whelan said. ‘We don’t really put too much emphasis on the early season meets because we already know what the goals are for the rest of the season.’

Although the races in the first half of the season don’t matter much, Whelan has still taken the first few races seriously to show consistency is his key to success.

At the Colgate Invitational, Whelan finished third on the team with a time of 25:34. Two weeks later, Whelan finished fifth on the team at the Paul Short Invitational. He then went on to claim the third-place spot on SU at the Wisconsin Adidas Invitational last weekend with a time of 24:50, just 14 seconds behind Pat Dupont, the Orange’s top finisher.

Whelan said he looks up to Dupont, a senior, as a leader and role model because of the tremendous amount of experience and success he has under his belt. Dupont described Whelan as a guy that takes what’s handed to him and makes the best of it.

‘I think he’s a really talented guy and when we need someone to step up, he usually fills that role,’ Dupont said.

One of the biggest setbacks for Whelan is the number of serious injuries he has had to overcome during his career at SU. He had a femoral stress fracture that cut back his training time last season. This year, Whelan came back with a fractured knee that required surgery.

‘For me, everything has been a little comeback, but I feel like I am at the same level as everyone else now,’ Whelan said. ‘At men’s Big East, I want to try and be in the top 15 and hopefully get All-Big East.’

Whelan was a freshman on the 2010 SU men’s cross country team that won its second consecutive Big East title last season. He knows what the feeling is like. He sees the Big East championship as the biggest meet of the season because the Big East rivalries are so strong and the teams in the conference are top-notch competitors.

Villanova, Providence and Georgetown are the longstanding rivalries, but schools like Notre Dame and Louisville are also on the Orange’s radar going into the Big East championship.

At the John Reif Memorial, the last pre-championship season race this Friday, the men’s top runners will not be running. But Whelan is an exception to this claim, as he will be looking for one more strong result before the biggest meet of the season to date.

And regardless of the meets that have occurred thus far in the season, the men’s team still has high expectations and has not lost sight of its season goal: defending its Big East title.

‘We want to do our best to step in there and try to defend our title,’ Fox said. ‘Right now we’re not one of the favorites, but we still have the people and the personality to try to win the meet.’

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Published on October 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm