For the men’s cross country team, everything is on the line this weekend.
The NCAA West Regional Championships will be contested at Stanford this Saturday, and with bids to nationals hanging in the balance, it is a do-or-die situation.
“You have to show up and have your best race,” coach Eric Peterson said. “Our guys are aware of that. We missed it last year by one point, and we are up for the challenge this year.”
Coming off a fifth-place finish at the Pac-10 Championships two weeks ago, UCLA dropped to No. 26 nationally and No. 4 in the region.
Qualifying for nationals is complicated with many determining factors. The first two teams in each region automatically qualify. There are nine regions, and once these spots are filled, 13 more at-large bids are given out to bring the field to 31 teams.
These bids depend on the team’s performance at regionals and how many wins they have against the teams that are already qualified for regionals.
A committee will sit down after all the regional championships and make the selections. If UCLA is able to secure a fourth-place finish or better, Peterson said they should be able to qualify for an at-large bid, because they have many wins against top teams.
The Bruins were aced out of making it to nationals last year and are looking to erase the bad memory.
“We came up short last year by one point, and that was a heart breaker,” senior Laef Barnes said. “If we do what we can and should do, we should be all right. There is a lot of pressure on us to perform well and bring this team back to nationals.”
With three teams ranked in the top five in the region competing this weekend, including No. 1 Oregon, No. 3 Stanford and No. 5 Portland, the Bruins will have their work cut out for them. Peterson is confident in the team however, and they are looking to improve from two weeks ago.
Barnes, a regular leader for the Bruins, dropped out of scoring position at the Pac-10 Championships after he suffered a lower back spasm, and sophomore Kent Morikawa was diagnosed the next day with an abdominal staph infection, which he had to have opened and drained.
“(Morikawa’s) been back in practice this week and he’s very tough,” Peterson said. “He’s very spirited, and he’s a great competitor, so I’m expecting him to be ready to compete.”
The women will also be traveling to Stanford for the regional championships, and after a disappointing 10th-place finish at the Pac-10 Championships, they will set improvement as their main goal.
“Everybody has to run up to their potential, and if we do so our team result will look more like when we were up at the Stanford Invitational,” Peterson said. “The team ran very well as a unit, and since then, we’ve struggled at reproducing that competitive concept.”
With a young team, the Bruins will be looking to freshmen Katja Goldring and Shelby Buckley to lead the team. Goldring ran in the No. 1 spot all season until the Pac-10 Championships, where Buckley took the lead.
“It’s like people aren’t expecting anything from us,” Buckley said. “We just want to perform the best we can, and we know we’re better than 10th in the Pac-10. We know there will be an improvement from two weeks ago.”