The Oregon men’s and women’s cross country teams started the season strong Saturday with first and eighth place team finishes, respectively, at the Roy Griak Invitational.
“I thought we made a major stride in this meet,” women’s head coach Tom Heinonen said. “We clearly showed we’re a much better team than last year.”
The women harriers improved from last year’s 28th-place finish by 20 spots, coming in eighth as a team with 229 points. Michigan State won with 72 points. Senior Carrie Zografos led the Ducks with her 17th-place finish, running the St. Paul, Minn., course in 21 minutes, 40.8 seconds. Freshman Nicole Feest, from Illinois, was the last Oregon scorer with a 77th-place finish in her first collegiate race.
In the middle of the Ducks’ scoring pack were three juniors: Magdalena Sandoval (36th, 22:02.0), Laura Harmon (45th, 22:11.7) and Eri Macdonald (61st, 22:28.9). The threesome finished within 30 seconds of each other, and less than a minute behind Zografos. Feest finished in 22:53.7, not far behind her other scoring teammates.
Zografos, a redshirt senior from Portland, finished at the head of the Duck pack for the fifth time in her career. She also runs distances for the track team in the spring season. Heinonen credits the track and field program with helping Zografos, Harmon and Sandoval stay in good condition during winter and spring.
The training helped the women defeat Arizona and Minnesota, two teams ranked ahead of them in recent polls. The women ran in the Gold 6000-meter race against 21 other Division I teams.
The 10th-ranked harrier men ran away with the 27 team, Gold 8000-meter race, ending with 96 points. Twelfth-ranked Eastern Michigan finished nine points behind the Ducks in second place.
Sophomore Ryan Andrus, from Utah, led the men’s scoring with an eighth-place finish in 24:41.3. All five of the men’s scorers finished within 15 seconds of each other, and sophomore Eric Logsdon closed the Ducks scoring with 24:55.2 in 32nd place. Junior Brett Holts came in second, 16th overall, while two-time All-American senior Jason Hartmann came in third among the Ducks and 19th overall.
Andrus finished first for the Ducks for the first time in his collegiate career. In his second full season as an Oregon harrier, Andrus has scored consistently, finishing third in three meets and fifth in another last season. The redshirt sophomore spent one year at Wisconsin, running under then-Badger coach Martin Smith. After taking two years off for a religious mission in Mexico,
Andrus transferred to Oregon and started running for Smith again.
Also running for the Ducks, although not scoring, were junior Noel Paulson and freshman William Viviani for the men, and senior Erinn Gulbrandsen and junior Alicia Snyder-Carlson for the women.
In the women’s team competition, Oregon’s Pacific-10 Conference foe Arizona State finished second while Washington State finished 18th. On the men’s side, all Pac-10 teams
finished in the top 25: Arizona State (9), Washington State (21) and
Arizona (24).
The men have three weeks of rest before their next meet, the Pre-National Invitational in Indiana on October 19th. The women will be at the Willamette Invitational in Salem’s Bush Park on Saturday.