For the men’s cross country team, the fifth-place finish at the Pre-NCAA Invitational was just what the team needed to close out the regular season.
“I think it went pretty well,” coach Eric Peterson said. “We went back there with high expectations to compete well in the meet, and the guys really did.”
Auburn barely edged out the Bruins by a margin of two points to snatch fourth place.
Senior Laef Barnes led the team with his 14th-place individual finish followed by redshirt senior Drew Shackleton, junior Marlon Patterson and sophomore Kent Morikawa. While Peterson believes his top four men ran as well as they have in any 8,000-meter race, he said it was the continuity that was lost.
“Laef did a nice job of getting himself out into that front pack, compared to the Stanford team; however, they had their whole lineup right where Laef was,” Peterson said.
Because of the high number of teams, two separate races were run, with Stanford winning the race in which UCLA competed. The Bruins will face Stanford again in two weeks at the Pac-10 Championships and will be looking to improve their race execution.
Peterson said it is important for the team to get out into the lead pack early to be in a good position to finish strong, and that mental preparation for the race will be key.
The fifth-place finish is higher than the Bruins have finished in recent years and bodes well for the postseason.
“We started this year feeling very good about our chances of being competitive in all those races,” Peterson said. “We feel like we’ve done a nice job of validating our preseason thoughts and feelings about our team.”
With the strong finish, Peterson has confidence in the team’s desire and ability to do even better. He says they are focusing on teams ahead of them and will be looking to continue improving and notching higher finishes, which will be essential in the postseason.
The weekend did not go as well on the women’s side, however, with the ladies finishing 25th in their race section.
“We didn’t handle the competitive environment very well,” Peterson said.
The Bruins were also battling sicknesses, with three runners under the weather. Peterson said that without a deep team, “the margin of error is very small.”
UCLA was plagued by a lack of older, more experienced girls who could have more easily handled the averse situation, and not being able to substitute when athletes were unable to perform at their best was a problem.
“It’s a big meet,” Peterson said. “You want things to be right and feel like you are healthy and excited about the meet. You don’t want to go in feeling uncertain or timid, and an illness has a way of derailing a person’s mental preparations.”
Freshman Katja Goldring once again proved herself to be the leader of the team, finishing first for the Bruins at 50th overall. Fellow freshman Shelby Buckley also came up strong for the Bruin team, finishing second and 87th overall.
With the postseason just around the corner, UCLA will have two weeks for the women’s side to get well and for the men’s side to hone and fine-tune their preparation before the Pac-10 Championships.