SIUE men’s and women’s cross country will compete Friday in the Midwest Regional in Lawrence, Kansas. The conference has two teams on both the men’s and women’s side ranked nationally heading into Friday’s competition.
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Following an eighth-place finish at the Big 12 Championships, the BU women will only face conference foes Texas and TCU.
For the men, they enter this weekend with momentum after a great effort at the BIG EAST Championships. “This is a race where you do not go all-out”, Franklin said.
That shouldn’t be a problem for the distance runners on the team, guys like Matthew Melancon, Travis Neuman and of course, Edward Cheserek, who is coming off his third straight Pac-12 title and who was recently named the conference’s male athlete of the year.
Leading the men’s team was junior Lucas Goodspeed, followed by freshman Larry Lopez and junior Russell Chase to round out the top three. A full list of team and individual qualifiers for the NCAA meet will be released on Saturday.
“You’re dealing with freshmen, true freshmen, you don’t know how they’re going to react to their first ever cross country 10K”, Kaczor said. The women past year placed seven runners on the All-Regional list, while the men notched four All-Regional honors.
Assistant coach Rebekah Smeltzer on preparing for the race: “We tell them every single race to race the best of your ability that day”, Assistant coach Smelter said. “It was harder for us this year because we don’t have that ability to coast through races and have the national spot secured for us in a sense”.
The Tigers finished 12th at the SEC Championships, while the Lady Tigers came in 14th place.
Horvath added, “Our primary goal at regionals is to place in the top two and automatically qualify for nationals”.
On the women’s side, the Wildcats seek to improve from their performance at the Pac-12 Championships as well. He is the lone returning all-regional runner for the OU men’s team. MSU was picked first in the women’s preseason poll, while the men were picked fourth. “That said, it’s the fourth year in a row here and the teams are the same, so everyone has a good idea about the course”.
Anderson, Galvin, McElroy and Scanlan all ran on last season’s regional squad for BU, while Anderson has been the lead runner for the Bears in all five of his races this season.
At the beginning of the season coach Joe Franklin outlined two main goals: win the Mountain West Conference Championships, and earn a spot to compete in nationals.
“Going into Regionals, I think my teammates and I have a lot of determination to finish the season with our strongest races yet”, said sophomore Erin McLaughlin.
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Like Braman, Phillips’ search for a complementary No. 5 scoring performance has been a season-long endeavor, but freshmen Fatema Jaffer and Sarah Candiano are coming off season-best performances at the ACC Championships.
