The Oregon women’s cross country team is on tour this weekend.
The Ducks are touring and previewing the course on which the NCAA Championships will be held at the end of the season in Saturday’s Pre-National meet.
The team, which has been unranked all season, travels to Terre Haute, Ind., for the meet. The Ducks will be running in the second of two women’s Division-I races. They are racing against 37 other teams, 18 of which are either ranked or have received votes in the national poll.
“If we could finish top-15 or better, we could help ourselves,” head coach Tom Heinonen said.
The Ducks need as many wins as they can get against other potential NCAA participants. The championships feature 31 teams; 18 come from the nine regional meets Nov. 16, and the other 13 will earn at-large berths based on regional finish and regular-season wins against the 18 automatically-qualifying teams.
In the White Race, which Oregon is running in, three teams ranked in the Top 10 will be the Ducks’ stiffest competition. Second-ranked Stanford, sixth-ranked North Carolina State and eighth-ranked Arizona State are all in Oregon’s race.
There are 252 runners in the race, the same amount as at the NCAA Championship race.
“The quality of this meet is close to half of the national meet,” Heinonen said.
The LaVern Gibson XC course is a two-loop course, with the women’s race 6,000 meters long.
“(The course) seems wide open and fair, not disorienting like the Griak,” Heinonen said.
The women have run two meets this season, the Roy Griak Invitational on Sept. 28 and the Willamette Invitational on Oct. 5. The Ducks finished eighth at the Griak and third
at Willamette.
Heinonen said he thinks the women will run better as a team than they did at the season’s first meet. They have been training together for five weeks, as compared to the two weeks they had before the Griak meet.
Most members of the team felt they raced better at the Willamette than at the Griak.
Oregon missed its top two runners in redshirt senior Carrie Zografos and junior Magdalena Sandoval after injuries kept them from running at the Willamette. Both are healthy enough to run in the Pre-National meet.
Freshman Nicole Feest, senior Erinn Gulbrandsen, junior Laura Harmon, redshirt junior Eri Macdonald, Sandoval, redshirt junior Alicia Snyder-Carlson and Zografos are expected to be Oregon’s seven entries in the race.
The men’s team was scheduled to race in the Pre-National meet also, but changed its travel plans and will not race in the meet.
Both the men and women will race together again Oct. 25 in Corvallis.