Nov. 11, 2010
Complete NCAA West Regional Notes Package in PDF Format 
EUGENE, Ore.--Only one meet separates The University of Arizona's men's and women's cross country programs from the NCAA National Championships and the end of the 2010 cross country season. That race comes Saturday as the No. 6 women and unranked men do battle with the best of the west at the NCAA West Regional Championships in Eugene, Ore.
For the women, simply showing up might be enough to seal the deal as far as earning a bid to the NCAA Championship meet. While a top-two finish at the regional meet automatically guarantees as spot at the NCAA Championships, a complicated formula that takes into account overall finishes at previous meets, performances against other top teams and a myriad of other factors is used to determine the at-large bids.
Coach James Li discusses this weekend's meet:
With three team victories on the season--including the Roy Griak Invitational crown- and runner-up finishes at both the Pre-National Invitational and Pac-10 Championships, the Wildcat women have done more than enough to earn their at-large points no matter what the outcome of Saturday's race.
Despite this, the women will be looking to seal that automatic qualification by finishing in the top-two at the Springfield Country Club this weekend--a feat the team hasn't accomplished since the 2001 season.
The women come in at the No. 6 spot in the country--a rank they have held for the better part of the season--and will face off against the likes of No. 4 Stanford, No. 7 Oregon and No. 11 Washington in what should prove to be another battle between the four squads that finished just six points away from each other at the Pac-10 Championships two weekends ago.
The men enter the race as a long-shot to advance beyond the race, but look to end the season strong after putting together their best team performance of the year at the Pac-10 meet. Even without a team invite to the national meet, junior transfer Stephen Sambu still stands a very good shot of advancing to the Nov. 22 meet and will simply need to perform as he has throughout the season to achieve the feat.
Sambu and the rest of the men's team will also be running their first 10,000-meter race of the season this weekend, which will be interesting for the junior as he never competed in a championship cross country race of that length in junior college though he is undefeated at the distance if you include track and field.
The women's 6,000-meter run will take place at 9:45 a.m. PST while the men will follow at 10:45 a.m. Results should be available shortly after the races conclude on The University of Oregon's website (www.goducks.com).
On the men’s side, junior transfer Stephen Sambu stuck with the leaders from Stanford for the majority of the race, only falling off pace a bit at the end. Still, against the stiffest competition he has faced in his career, Sambu finished fifth overall and—maybe more important– now knows what it takes to take on the big guns.
Wildcats In The Rankings
The UA women kicked off the season ranked in the USTFCCCA Coaches’ Poll at No. 25 following their first NCAA Championship appearance since 2001. The Wildcats climbed to No. 23 when the first week of rankings following competition came out but dropped to No. 26 after Week 2, despite thoroughly dominating their competition at the Dave Murray Invitational at home, the team’s first meet as a whole team.
The drop in rankings was soon forgotten, however, as the squad rocketed to No. 9 following their victory at the Griak Invitational and again to No. 6 after winning the ASU Invitational the following weekend. The women maintained their No. 6 ranking after their second place finish at the Pre-National Invite and have continued to stay there after their conference championship performance. This is the highest ranking for the UA women since finishing fourth overall at the NCAA Championships in 2001 and first top 10 rankings since the same season.
The UA women have also climbed to No. 2 in the NCAA West Regional rankings, behind only Stanford.
Last Time Out
The women helped make the final Pac-10 Championships before the conference expands to 12 teams a memorable one, with the top four teams finishing within 6 points of each other.
The Stanford women took home their 15th team title at the meet with a total of just 62 points, edging the Wildcats who finish with 65 points who just edged the Oregon and Washington women who tied with 68 points.
It was just the second time in conference history that four teams finished with less than 70 points and marked the closest margin of victory for the Pac-10 meet in history—mark that was previous held by Arizona as well when they fell to Oregon by just five points in 1995.
Sophomore Jenn Bergman led the way for Arizona again, coming home in seventh place in 20:15.32, her second time pacing the Wildcats this season.
Freshman Elvin Kibet (11), sophomore Megan Meyer (12) and junior Hannah Moen (13) finished back-to-back-to-to back to join Bergman in earning All-Conference honors. Freshman Amanda Russell finished 22nd overall to cap the Arizona scoring. All five women ran person best on the course and ran under 21 minutes.
Successful Run
Up until the Pre-National meet, the UA women had won all four meets they had taken part in up too that point, including the Griak Invite, the Dave Murray Invite, the George Kyte Classic and the ASU Invite.
With back-to-back runner-up finishes at the Pre-National Meet and Pac-10 Championships, the UA women have yet to finish worse than second at any meet this season.
Women Not Alone
The women’s streak is impressive, but it’s hard to judge it as being more exceptional than the pace Sambu has set in his collegiate career.
Sambu did not lose a single meet to a collegiate competitor while at Rend Lake Community College, winning more individual national titles in the process than most teams will see in a decade. That streak encompassed both his cross country and track and field schedule and he has kept it going as a Wildcat, winning the Dave Murray Invite and the Griak in his first two Division I appearance.
Though Sambu finished fifth at the conference championships, he stuck with last year’s NCAA runner-up in Elliot Heath of Stanford for the majority of the race and performed exceptionally considering he had missed several weeks of practice time before entering the meet.
Pac-10 Tidbits
One interesting thing to note on the women’s side is that, in the history of the Pac-10 Championships, only three teams in the conference have won the team title: Oregon (7), Washington (3) and with their win at this year’s meet, Stanford leads the way with 15 victories.
On the same token, no team outside of Arizona State (7) has finished second in the meet more times than Arizona, who now has five runner-up finishes in the 24-year history of the event.
UA head Coach James Li has often said that winning the conference is pretty much equivalent to winning the national championship and he is not far off. Five of the past nine National Championships teams have come from the Pac-10 and all won the conference crown as well.
Despite the conference’s dominance of cross country team competition, only two Pac-10 athletes have ever been able to claim the individual national title and both were Wildcats. Amy Skieresz accomplished the feat in 1996 and Tara Chaplin did the same in 2001.
Oddly enough, despite the UA women’s strong season last year, they had not cracked the top-5 at the conference meet since 2001 when they also finished second. On the flip side of that statistic, the UA team had not finished below fifth in a meet from 1988 up until that 2001 season.
The Arizona men have won the event seven times since the 1969 season, most recently in 1999 and have posted eight conference champions in that time. Robert Cheseret was the most recent victory, winning back-to-back in 2004 and 2005.
On to the Regional
The Wildcats ended a whole host of obnoxious streaks at the Pac-10 meet and will look to end another slew at the NCAA West Regional as well. The women have finished no better than fifth at the meet since 2002—a fifth place finish at last year’s meet being the only saving grace since the team finished as the runner-up at the 2001 Regional Championships.
More Regional Tidbits
The regional meet will not just be interesting to watch for the UA women, but also to see how Stephen Sambu does in his first ever 10,000-meter cross country championship race. While undefeated at the distance on the track, the junior college circuit only features an 8,000-meter championship run—an event Sambu mastered and never lost at while at Rend Lake Community College (though it’s also interesting to note he never lost a 10,000-meter race on the track either).
