When the gun goes off to signal the start of Friday’s NCAA West Regional championships, the Oregon men won’t need to worry about No. 6 Stanford or No. 10 Portland. With just over a week until the national championships, the one thing that could potentially beat the Ducks on Friday is themselves.
Oregon has yet to officially punch its ticket to the NCAA championships, but with the West being one of the deeper regions in the country, at least two to three teams are expected to receive at-large bids to the championship meet. In addition, a pair of automatic bids will be awarded to the top two teams at Friday’s meet.
This puts No. 4 Oregon in an awkward position. The Ducks’ top runners will have to compete on Friday in order to qualify for the NCAA championships, but will have just eight days to recover for the championships the following weekend.
For Duck runners, delivering an all-out effort might not be as wise as conserving energy. In a sport built on drive and competition, this concept may seem counterintuitive. Oregon senior Parker Stinson is confident that the team can still have a strong showing without exerting all of its energy.
“I think we’d like to come away with a win as long as nobody is having to do anything silly for that win,” Stinson said. “You’re so close that if you’re not careful, Edward (Cheserek) and I could go 1-2 or something and get really excited and crush some people. But I think you got to be careful not to do that because a lot of times the people that do that, unless it kind of happens naturally, they have a hard time doing as well as they’d like at NCAAs.”
Stinson’s teammate, Edward Cheserek, shined at the Pac-12 championship two weeks ago, where he became the first freshman to ever win an individual Pac-12 championship. The Kenyan-born harrier out of St. Benedict’s Prep (Newark, N.J.) looked extremely comfortable for most of the race before unleashing a deadly kick over the final 1,000 meters to pull away from the rest of the field. Don’t expect to see that same finishing kick again on Friday, as head coach Robert Johnson made his position very clear when asked whether Cheserek has the green light to go for the win if faced with a similar situation at Regionals.
“Not in a million years. The more we can save, the better,” Johnson said. “It’s like holding the thoroughbred down that just wants to go. You’ve got the jockey in coach (Andy) Powell pulling back on the reigns as hard as he can pull back on them. It’s tough because of course once the gun goes off, they have that instinct and that competitive fire that’s unbridled.”
A final wrench in the fray is that at the regional championships the men will move up in distance from its previous 8,000-meter races to a 10,000-meter race, which will also be the distance run at the NCAA championships. Veterans like Stinson have run their fair share of 10,000-meter races, but the senior indicated that Friday’s meet could be a good tune up for freshman Jake Leingang, who has been Oregon’s No. 4 runner at the last two meets.
For the Oregon women, the attitude is slightly different. With five West teams ranked in the top 18 and seven in the top 26, No. 15 Oregon will need a strong effort to earn an NCAA championship bid. After being edged out by No.12 Washington for third place at the Pac-12 championships, sophomore Molly Grabill said that the close loss to its northwest rivals gives Oregon “the hunger to come back at regionals and come back fighting.”
Oregon has featured a close pack in its races this season, with just 19 seconds separating its No.1 and No. 5 runners at both the Pac-12 championships and the Pre-National Invitational. Absent a high individual scorer, it has been key for Oregon to feed off each other during races and move up as a group. Despite lacking a “low stick,” the squad features plenty of depth, as junior Lindsay Crevoiserat was able to step up as the No. 5 runner at Pac-12′s in place of Grabill, who was slightly off her normal pace.
“It’s just special,” Grabill said of Oregon’s tight pack. “Maurica (Coach Maurica Powell) always says, we’re interchangable. If one of us is having a hard day, there’s always someone else that can easily step up and fill that position.”
The West Regional championships will be held at the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex in Sacramento, Calif., with the men’s 10,000-meter race scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. and the women’s 6,000-meter race set to begin at 11:45 a.m.
Follow Chris Mosch on Twitter @chris_mosch
