Cross country coaches Rick Anderson and Jeanette Powless discussed their teams’ strengths and weaknesses and shared their hopes and expectations for the races today at the Lou Vasquez cross country meet in San Francisco.
The women’s race is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. and the men’s race will follow at 4:30 p.m.
The men’s and women’s cross country teams will compete today at a racecourse in Golden Gate Park. The women’s race is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. and the men’s race will follow at 4:30 p.m.
Anderson has ten consecutive men’s Conference championship wins under his belt and his teams have won the Norcal championships for the past six years.
Powless’s teams have always had a nearly 100% transfer rate onto four year schools.
“(They) did receive last year the state’s highest honor for academic scholar achievement for (their) cross country team with a 3.4 average GPA,” said Powless.
As for this season the men’s team is off to a slow start, “four out of the last five state championships and until last week we hadn’t lost to a Northern California Community College since 2009… (We) lost to Hartnell,” said Anderson.
On the women’s side Powless said, “Last year we were third in NorCal (and) seventh in state. That will be a tough act to follow on the group that we have being so young this year.”
The past few races for the men have been difficult due to a young team and harsh course conditions.
“Our times so far this year are horrible. No I mean they are really horrible because the racecourse at Sierra College is really slow, tons of turns, tons of hills, tons loose dirt,” said Anderson.
In terms of Powless’ and her runners performances so far she said, “In Santa Rosa at the Pat Ryan Invite, we were 2nd place out of the teams there. We were able to take off three minutes from our one to five combined time and bring our group down to less than three minutes for our top five.”
The top runners for the women’s team who have led, “the last two races were Arena Archuleta but the last race was led by Danel Camacho from Roseville High School. So with everybody being healthy and well, it will be interesting as a… basically full team and who will be our leader between Aryana Archuleta and Danel Camacho.”
This morning just as they were boarding the bus, some of the runners commented on today’s race, one of them being Camacho who said “It’s flat and fast and I am hoping for a personal record (PR).”
Freshman Aryana Archuleta said “I don’t have a strategy. I never have.”
Freshman Carly Kleefeld said, “I’ve been injured for a while… the weather (will) be really nice and I tend to run good in cold weather.”
Men’s runner, sophomore Casey Aguierre said, “I haven’t ran this course in two years. My race strategy would be would be to take one of my teammates to race together and push each other.”
Both Anderson and Powless have high hopes for today’s race, “We’ve got a chance for a little bit of revenge (today) and the guys seem really ready.”
Powless said “We’ve been doing a lot of work with the ladies with pace work and feeling out what their paces should be and working on running a smarter (and) better race.”
