All the talk, all the speculation, and all the wonder ended Sunday morning at the Pacific-10 Conference Championships when UCLA and USC woke up.
The two schools – expected to contend for the top two spots – were mired in slumps on Saturday, with UCLA in fourth and USC tied for fifth. Then, the teams broke loose.
In fact, the Bruins and Trojans were so good and matched so equally Sunday, the win for UCLA came down to one event. The 4×400, the final women’s event, featured the top squads for both schools.
In the end, it wasn’t much of an event as UCLA won by four seconds. However, it still came as a surprise to UCLA head coach Jeanette Bolden.
“We did not expect to win,” she said. “We didn’t have a great first day and I as a coach needed to pump up myself. One of my assistant coaches got me into it by telling me we really could win if we just do these things and let it come down to the mile relay.”
UCLA finished with 160 points, an improvement of 128 points from day one. USC, on the other hand, was only three points below its cross-town rival. The Trojans improved immensely as well, racking up 126 points during the second day.
During their improvements, the two schools won 11 of the 14 events held Sunday. Only Arizona’s Brianna
Glenn (200-meter dash), Stanford’s Lauren Fleshman (5,000) and Arizona’s Amy Linnen (pole vault) were able to take first in their respective events.
“USC has a great team,” Bolden said. “We have a great team as well but we just have a lot of young people and I thought experience would take over.”
UCLA, which has won six consecutive Pac-10 titles, defeated USC in the 2001 Pac-10 Championships before the Trojans took the NCAA title at Hayward Field.
Host Washington State wasn’t in the top three after Sunday, but the Cougars, able to get wins by Whitney Evans in the high jump and Ellannee Richardson in the heptathlon a week ago, finished solidly in fifth place.
Unlike last season, in which the host school, California, disappointed, finishing in seventh place, the Cougars were able to maintain their point lead after day one.
Washington State was tied with the Trojans after the competition’s initial day, but held its own on Sunday and finished 18 points ahead of sixth-place Oregon.
Of the athletes who competed for the Cougars, runner Tamara Gulley should earn special marks from her coaches. She finished third in the 100 hurdles after suffering through a tough season.
“I think I was just expecting to finish the race,” Gulley said after the event. “I had a very trying season. I have had back problems. Achilles aches, hip flexor problems, and I just wanted to finish. I was just trying to hang in there with the best of them and I did.”
Gulley finished behind USC’s Natasha Neal and UCLA’s Sheena Johnson.
Surprise, surprise.
California finished eighth with 44 points – only one spot ahead of the 2001 championships – but received 10 of those points from a single athlete.
Jennifer Joyce, who finished third a year ago in Berekely, Calif., won the hammer throw in Pullman, Wash., with a throw of 204-01, less than two feet ahead of USC’s Juliana Tudja. However, that was all it took to give the senior her first Pac-10 Championship.
“I was having a terrible day,” she said. “I really don’t know what was wrong but every throw I improved a little bit. By the time I was going to my last throw I was figuring things out. My rhythm and tempo started to come back toward the end.”
E-mail sports reporter Hank Hager at [email protected]
