Men’s cross finishes third at C-USA championships
While it is always nice to see history being made, there is nothing quite like the sting of having something historical happen at your expense. The men’s cross country team experienced this painful feeling last Saturday as third-ranked University of Texas-El Paso scored a perfect 15 points en route to its second-straight Conference USA Cross Country Championships.
Rice will now take a week off, after which the team will head to Fayetteville, Ark., for the NCAA South Central Regional Championships on Nov. 10. The Owls have already competed in Arkansas once before this season — they placed 11th at the Chile Pepper Festival on Oct. 13.
There will be only two teams ranked in the top 30 at the regional meet: No. 7 University of Arkansas and No. 16 University of Texas. However, this lack of ranked competition will not make things much easier for the Owls, as they still have to go up against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, which, behind first-place finishes of lead runner Shadrack Songok, has already outrun Rice twice this year.
Last week, UTEP runners put on a clinic as they clocked the top five individual times, breaking the scoring record they set only one year ago. Stephen Samoei, the two-time defending Conference USA Athlete of the Year in cross country, won the individual title by a wide margin of over twenty seconds.
But UTEP was not the only squad to meet expectations. The University of Tulsa, ranked 17th in the country, continued to have its best season ever after pacing second with 42 points.
Although Rice finished a distant third with 110 points, the spread between the top four runners was only 42 seconds. Junior Brett Olson placed 17th at 26 minutes, 48.6 seconds. Sophomore Brad Morris placed 18th, six seconds behind, and junior Justin Maxwell crossed the finish line in 21st place at 27:15.5. Sophomore Scott Zivick and senior Colby Keithan finished 23rd and 39th, respectively.
One factor that hindered the Owls’ chances of victory was the harsh weather — not, as most expected, the high altitude in El Paso, Texas, where the meet was held.
“The altitude was a factor that everyone was concerned about,” Morris said. “But we weren’t really ready for the other conditions. The sun was beating down and it was dry as could be. Everyone had chapped lips.”
The Owls’ was also once again hampered by injuries, which have plagued the team all year. On Saturday they were without junior Aaron Robson, their top runner, who was held out of a second straight race with a sore calf.
But even with the injuries, the results from the race on Saturday proved that the conference is one of the strongest in the nation.
“If we had all those guys healthy, everybody on the team that hadn’t been running, then we would have finished third,” head coach Jon Warren (Jones ‘88) said. “Even if we had a team that was top 30, top 25 in the nation, we still would have been third at this meet.”
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