The race for SCIAC cross country glory—the team plaque and individual cup that signify the pinnacles of distance running accomplishment in our league—is underway, and although the championship race has yet to be run, the potential champions have been narrowed from many to few after the first SCIAC race of the season.

Both team and individual champions are determined solely from the results of Multi-Duals—held two weeks ago at La Mirada Park—and SCIACs—set to start at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. That means only two teams and four individuals still have a reasonable chance of taking home the much-coveted and cheaply-made hardware.

At Multi-Duals, as our loyal cross country fans will remember, CMS finished with a 7-0 record, easily beating out its competition and embarrassing some of the lesser teams. P-PXC finished strong in second with a 6-1 record, leading CMS through its top three runners but losing on the fourth and fifth (and therefore overall). La Verne, whose top five impressively consisted of all freshmen, finished a distant and unthreatening third, setting them up for a podium finish but more or less extinguishing all hopes for a league title.

On the individual side of things, Brian Sutter CM ’13 took Multis by a three-second margin over Eric Kleinsasser Oxy ’12—the two-time defending champion who is improving week by week while recovering from a late-August broken collar bone suffered during late-night revelry. Finishing closely behind the top two harriers in third and fourth was an objectively attractive duo from P-P—Charlie Enscoe PO ’11 and Alex Johnson PZ ’13, six and 15 seconds behind the leader, respectively.

Both the team and individual SCIAC champions, though, are determined by the results from the two SCIAC meets—the one now long since past and the other soon to come. Each meet is weighted equally, but in the case of a draw for first place—either individually or as a team—the higher placing finisher at tomorrow’s competition wins the league.

Given this somewhat unusual setup—league champions in cross country are usually determined solely by the championship race—the eventual 2010 SCIAC individual and team champions are largely determined, and yet still up in the air.

If the fifth place finisher from Multi-Duals, AJ Licon of La Verne, places first tomorrow morning—an unlikely occurrence given how far back he was from the leaders—he would still need Sutter to place fifth or worse, Kleinsasser to place fourth or worse, Enscoe to place third or worse, etc., in order to win the SCIAC title. On the other hand, although CMS won Multi-Duals easily over its competition, if P-PXC were to prevail on Saturday by even the smallest of margins, the Sagehens would win the league title, no matter the order of the remaining teams.

Given the results from Multi-Duals, then, we can focus our attention on the top two teams—CMS and P-PXC—and the top four individuals—Sutter, Kleinsasser, Enscoe, and Johnson—from the most recent SCIAC meeting. Who, we must wonder, will bring home with much joy and pride the oft-dreamed-of plaque and cup?

Of the four harriers still in the running for the resplendent drinking vessel, Sutter of CMS and Kleinsasser of Occidental are surely the favorites for the Dub (the “double-U,” “W,”—the “Win”).

Sutter has been leading the league’s top team all season, has the fastest eight-kilometer time of the season for a SCIAC runner, and demonstrated his speed and ability to win a close race at La Mirada.

Although Kleinsasser lost two weeks ago to Sutter—his first loss ever in an all-SCIAC cross country race—he has improved rapidly since recovering from his preseason injury, and he is undefeated in his two races at Prado Regional Park—the site of the 2010 SCIAC Championships, and the same place the last two years’ meets were held.

The mere—and largely incidental—three seconds that separated Sutter and Kleinsasser two weeks ago tell us little of who the eventual winner will be. One betting on Sutter might cite his most recent win, his fast times run earlier in the season, and his strong finishing kick. Equally suggestive is Kleinsasser’s SCIAC cross country dominance throuhgout in his career, along with his progress throughout the current season. One cannot help but note, however, that the Occidental junior was out-kicked (beaten in the final stretch) by opponents at last spring’s SCIAC 5K track final and last fall’s nail-bitingly close West Regional meet.

Of course, either of the top two Sagehens could pull a huge upset and take the title themselves. The fact that they finished third and fourth at Multi-Duals, however, means that placing first in and of itself will not guarantee a league championship. Enscoe needs to win and have Sutter place third or worse, while Johnson would need to win and have Sutter finish in no better than fourth and Kleinsasser third. Obviously a P-P individual victory is by no means the most likely scenario, but it certainly could occur. And the front-running P-P harriers have the added motivation of their team’s hopes of installing The Cup as the figurehead of the Viking ship they plan to build post-race and pre-sailing the 5C’s Saturday evening.

On the team side of things, CMS—the defending champions—stand as the clear, undisputed favorite. Besides going 7-0 at Multi-Duals and defeating their SCIAC rivals without difficulty in earlier-season meets, the Stags are the only team in SCIAC that have been ranked nationally all season—CMS is ranked second in the West Region compared to P-PXC’s seventh and La Verne’s ninth. Sutter has shown his ability to lead the team all year, and Kris Brown CM ’11, despite a slightly sub-par race at Multi-Duals, undoubtedly has the ability to run with the top runners in the league. The team’s greatest strength, though, seems to be its depth: CMS placed nine of the top 20 runners at Multi-Duals compared to P-P’s four, and had their entire top five (the scoring members of a team) in the top 12.

P-PXC by no means plans to settle for second, despite being the clear underdog. In addition to their top two runners—both looking to place in the top two in the league—the Sagehens have a strong if yet unproven three-through-five group of runners whose performance will be essential to prevailing over CMS. If the three men can improve by an average of five places or so per runner from Multi-Duals, the team should be in contention with CMS for the SCIAC plaque.

SCIACs promises to be full of titillating excitement and surprises. Multi-Duals gave us a taste of what to expect, but it’s impossible to say what exactly will take place tomorrow morning on the rolling grass slopes of Prado Park. In a week’s time, the results will seem as though they had been inevitable, but to feel the tense uncertainty and overwhelming emotion of which this championship race consists, you really need to make it out to the course, the grass still wet and the cup still unearned.