P-P Cross Country Turns in 'Decent' Performance at Stanford Invitational
BY EZEKIEL PFEIFER
Sports Associate

The Pomona-Pitzer men’s and women’s cross-country teams came home Sunday from the Stanford Invitational having put in decent team performances. The men’s team finished thirteenth out of 22 teams in the field and the women’s team finished nineteenth out of 26 teams.

The invitational was held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with numerous college and high school teams competing in different races of various lengths and divisions. As a result, the Pomona-Pitzer teams knew that the field would be impressive.

“The field was very large and is the most competitive field we will see all season, even more so than Regionals and Nationals,” said coach Kirk Reynolds. “There were nationally ranked NCAA Division I and II teams there, and we knew going in that we weren’t going to win anything.”

The top performer for the Sagehens on the men’s team was Crosby Freeman ’06, who placed forty-fifth overall out of 175 runners in the 8K men’s race with a time of 25:27, just 5:08 off of the winning runner. Will Leer ’07 was the next Sagehen to finish, coming in at seventy-eighth place with a time of 26:16. Nate DeFelice ’05, Golden Krishna ’05, and Sean McCarron ’07 followed for Pomona-Pitzer all coming in the top 125 runners and breaking the 28 minute mark. David Marshall ’05 and Andy Barnette ’04 stayed under 30 minutes in bringing up the rear for the Sagehens, capping off a solid team showing off thirteenth out of 22 teams.

The home team, Stanford, dominated the men’s short 4K, and long 8K, races on Saturday, winning both team events and having five out of the top six runners in each race. The runners-up in the 4K race were UCLA in second place and UC Berkeley in third, while in the 8K race, Cal Poly took second with Chico State in third.

The Sagehen women’s team fared somewhat worse on Saturday, with the top performer, Amy Rapp ’06 not finishing until 90 other runners did, running the 6K race in 23:44, finishing 6:22 behind the winning runner. Stefanie McDougall ’04, Isa Barth-Rogers ’05, and Susie Roley ’04 came in next for P-P, all completing the race in under 25 minutes and within the top 125 runners. Ann Prouty ’05, Shannon Wolff ’04, and Karen Ring ’07 rounded out the rest of the Sagehen women runners, all of whom finished the race in less than 27 minutes.

While this race was not one in which the Sagehens starred or ran in the lead pack, it was a valuable learning experience.

“We are fortunate to go to this meet annually because it mimics the bigger meets we’ll see later in the season,” said coach Reynolds. “During October, we will only go to smaller, conference meets where there will be only 8 schools running and our top people will be in the lead pack immediately. We needed some experience of another sort, where our top people are being swept along and surrounded by a pack of runners, for the meets on our schedule in November. We only took our top 7 women, too, instead of the whole team. Those who didn’t race at Stanford will race this Saturday at Biola, while most of the others will take this coming Saturday off.”

The runners knew coming in that the field in the race would be large in number and difficult in level, but it was still something of a shock for some when approaching the starting line.

“It was a huge field,” said team member Karen Ring ’07. “It made me a little nervous to see all those people at the starting line, something like 200 or so, but when I started running, it felt pretty much like any other race.”

Other California schools beat out Stanford in the two women’s races, with the results in the 4K race being UC Berkeley in first, Stanford in second, and University of Victoria in third. In the 6K race, UCLA came in first, Stanford in second, and Universty of Wisconsin in third.

The first race of the season with almost all of the teams in the SCIAC conference in competition comes this Saturday, October 4, at the Biola Invitational at La Mirada. This race will help the Sagehens gauge how they will stack up against the rest of the SCIAC field this season. Last year, P-P finished second only to arch-rivals Claremont-Mudd-Scripps; this year, they hope to take the top spot when the season comes to a close.