With three meets under their belt and two new coaches, the Ducks will send a full squad to Palo Alto, California, on Friday, Oct. 26, to compete in the Pac-12 Cross-Country Championships. The women will race first at 11 a.m. on the Stanford Golf Course.
The Pac-12 is deep as usual this season; The conference has six teams ranked in the top-10 in the nation with Colorado’s women are ranked No. 1, according to the U.S. Track & Field Cross Country Coaches Association. After a solid tune-up at the Wisconsin Pre-Nationals, both the women and men are ranked in the top 15. The Oregon women are No. 4 while the men are at No. 11.
“You kinda got a taste of what it’s going to be like in the championship season at pre-nats,” head coach Robert Johnson said. ”A chance for us to really test ourselves against some really good individual and nationally ranked teams.”
For the men’s and women’s coaches, Ben Thomas and Helen Lehman-Winters, this will be their first taste of the Pac-12 Championships. However, they are both experienced coaches, and have over 30 years of coaching between them.
“We kinda got off to a late start,” Johnson said. “But everything training wise has been going really well. Everybody is healthy, and we look for everybody to be competing this coming weekend.”
Oregon will race against former Ducks Katie Rainsberger, Lilli Burdon, Tanner Anderson and Mick Stanovsek, all of whom transferred to Washington prior to the season. They did so to join Andy and Maurica Powell, longtime distance coaches at Oregon who left over the summer.
Jessica Hull, the 2018 NCAA Outdoor 1,500-meter champion, is coming off her best result of the season after a win at Pre-Nationals.
“We’ve definitely emphasized running together as a bunch a lot, because in cross-country it doesn’t really matter individually,” Hull said. “You need your whole team to do well.”
On the men’s side, No. 4 Stanford is the favorite, in large part due to senior Grant Fisher. He’s the defending champion who just won Pre-Nationals in Wisconsin, and will be racing on his home turf. James West has been the fastest runner for Oregon twice this year, with a first-place finish at the Oregon XC Preview and a fourth-place finish at Pre-Nationals.
As big as this meet is, the runners have said they are focused on the coming weeks to the NCAA regional and championship races. This race will be the last 8 kilometer race of the season before transitioning to 10 kilometers for the last two. Redshirt senior Blake Haney said the team has been running twice a day, a method from Thomas which should prepare them better for longer races.
“This is the most excited I’ve seen a group for cross-country since I’ve been here,” Haney said. “For us, there’s been a lot of positives and I’m real excited to see how we perform.”
Follow August Howell on Twitter @howell_august