USA - The University of La Verne men's and women's cross country teams hit the ground running from coast to coast this weekend. The men's freshmen team competed in the Highlander Invitational in Riverside, California while the varsity men's and women's teams both competed in the Connecticut College Invitational. Both events allow the men's and women's programs to compete against teams from all across the nation.
The freshmen team competed at a high level, with all of the seven members setting personal record times. It was the second time that the team had competed in Riverside this season, so the familiarity with the course allowed the runners to best themselves from their previous runs in the invitational. With nine of their team members in Connecticut, the squad was still victorious over two other varsity teams from the SCIAC in addition to Division III Texas Lutheran and Division II Cal State LA, finishing on the heels of Occidental College and Redlands.
Riverside, Men's Freshman Results https://www.tfrrs.org/results/xc/20073/2022_Highlander_Invitational
The women's squad had an excellent performance at the Connecticut Invitational, placing 13th while beating nationally ranked New York University.
Destiny Espinoza-Guerrero performed at a high level despite a knee injury. The top four runners for La Verne all had personal record performances.
Peyton Carrera set a new personal record by 50 seconds and Tori Medrano set a personal record by 70 seconds. The group eclipsed their previous best and is continuing to reach new levels as the season progresses in preparation for the SCIAC Championships that are soon approaching.
The Men's top group performed strongly at the Connecticut invitational, finishing 13th and also defeated New York University. La Verne was eleven points from 10th place in a meet that had twenty-three regionally ranked teams and ten nationally ranked teams. Head coach Jamie Norton was very pleased with the performance of his group on the East Coast. "It was a challenging race environment with almost four hundred athletes on the starting line on a course that is not suited to that many runners, but Junior Michael Sahagun showed a lot of poise and used his experience to lead our team in what was a huge bounce back race for him. Marcelo Martinez also performed very well, breaking 26:00 for the first time in his career and holding down our 3rd position. Edward Carrillo also has struggled a bit to find his footing over the last month but had a great race to come very close to his personal record and hold down our 5th spot. This was without a doubt, top to bottom our best team performance of the year when looking at the men's and women's groups all combined. At the same time, I think every athlete is hungry for more and feels like they are ready to keep improving over the next few weeks. We definitely have some things we need to work on but we are getting our legs under us at the right time of year and going to continue fine-tuning what we need to do to put our best races out there at Conference and Regionals."
Connecticut College, Women's team (White race) and Men's team (Blue Race): https://www.tfrrs.org/results/xc/20321/Connecticut_College_Invitational
Next up for the Leopards; The SCIAC Championships October 29th at Prado Park in Chino, California.
