Both the men’s and women’s cross country teams head to chilly Pullman, Wash., this weekend for the 2003 Pacific-10 Conference Championships.
A year ago at this time, the Oregon men finished the Pac-10 Championship second overall, behind only eventual Pac-10 and National Champion Stanford.
Oregon was led by then-sophomore Ryan Andrus.
Stanford, which poses the biggest challenge to Oregon, isn’t a team the Ducks are looking to take down. The team admitted it is shooting for second in both the Pac-10 Championship and NCAA Western Regional on Nov. 15.
“We disassociate from Stanford,” senior Brett Holts said. “Beating them is not going to happen. But we know we can be the second best team. We just need to go back there and prove it was no fluke.”
The women finished fifth overall last year. An eighth-place finish from since-graduated Carrie Zografos paved the way. Current senior Magdalena Sandoval finished 36th overall, followed by 44th-place finisher Eri Macdonald, who is now a senior with the Ducks.
This season, both Macdonald and Sandoval will lead a young Duck squad into the Pac-10 championship and are expected to have a stronger finish then the duo had a year ago.

Rankings VI
In each of the six polls released by the media this year, the Oregon men have fallen a few notches. The Ducks were selected as the pre-season No. 4 cross country team overall.
They’ve since plummeted down the rankings. The Ducks were bumped down to fifth in the second poll, followed by an eighth place ranking. Then it was back up to seventh place, and now the team sits as the No. 18 in the country.
The men harriers don’t pay much attention to the rankings, which do not qualify or disqualify a team from running in any national meets. However, rankings do have some legitimacy. They serve as an indication of how the team has performed throughout out the year.
The Ducks need to run well at either the Pac-10 Championship or the NCAA Western Regional in Portland if they want to ensure that they will make it to the NCAA Championship in November.
“We think we have enough at-large points from earlier races,” Holts said. “It should get us in if we have a terrible day at regionals. But, we have left it to chance before and we were left out.
“We had the best week of practice all year. We got back into the grind, working hard, but a smart hard. We have an attitude that we will out work the other team and be tougher. The team’s hopes are up.”
On the women’s side, Oregon hasn’t been ranked all year, and the team did not receive any votes in the latest edition of the cross country polls.