By Drew Perraut
Sports Writer

On Saturday, the Pomona-Pitzer women’s cross-country team traveled to San Diego to participate in the Aztec Invitational. The five kilometer race, sponsored by San Diego State University, was held in Balboa Park. The race was divided by level, with most of the Sagehen women competing in the open division. Laura Bishop ’03 was chosen to participate in the invitational division, made up primarily of Division I runners.
The Sagehens did well overall, placing seventh out of twelve teams. In the open race, Amy Rapp ’06 finished seventeenth with a time of 20:28. She was followed by Nika Strezelecka ’06 (thirty-first with a time of 21:02) and Susie Roley ’04 (thirty-ninth with a time of 21:30). Team member Alex Borst ’05 commented on the race, “No one had a terrible race, but no one had an outstanding performance, which is where we want to be. We start here and get faster.”
The race was only the second of the year for the team.
Bishop finished in the top third of the Invitational race with a time of 19:13. Bishop, who is very pleased with the team this year, expects them to do very well over the season. In particular, she is happy with freshmen who have just joined the team, saying that they have proved to be exceptionally strong.
“[This year’s team is] significantly stronger than it has been in several seasons. We just have much more depth,” Bishop said.
The P-P team’s outlook for the year is very good. They lost few experienced runners at the end of last year and the new additions to the team are already competitive.
There is talk in the Sagehen locker room of finally defeating the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps team, which has dominated SCIAC cross-country for the past four years. “[The team has] a shot at beating CMS and winning conference,” Bishop said. To beat C-M-S this season would be a grand culmination for Bishop and the other graduating seniors who have worked so hard over the past four years.
The cross-country team will participate in six more events this season. The most important of these are the two SCIAC meets on October 19 and November 2.
It is at these meets that the Sagehen women hope to take the title away from the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps runners. As Borst notes, the teams prospects are, for the first time in several years, “very exciting.”