Cross nation units a PR at last-ever Pac-12 championships

The boys’s and girls’s cross nation groups traveled as much as the College of Washington for this system’s remaining look within the Pac-12 championships Friday. The ladies’s staff completed in second place, narrowly dropping to Washington by simply two factors, and the lads’s staff received all of it, taking back-to-back convention championships.

Going into the race, the ladies’s staff was already the winningest program in convention historical past with 17 Pac-12 titles. The boys’s staff, nevertheless, was tied with Oregon at 16 titles every. After Friday’s win, Stanford broke that tie and can formally exit the Pac-12 as probably the most profitable males’s and girls’s cross-country applications within the convention’s lengthy historical past.

Runners from Stanford had been the primary to cross the end line in each the lads’s and girls’s races. Senior and defending NCAA out of doors monitor and subject 5K and 10K champion Ky Robinson dominated the lads’s race, finishing the 8-kilometer race in 22:40.2, 11 seconds quicker than the second place finisher. Final 12 months’s males’s race particular person champion, Cardinal runner Charles Hicks, went on to win the 2022 NCAA championship. The ladies’s staff was led by particular person champion freshman Amy Bunnage, who completed her 6-kilometer race in 19:09.7 to turn out to be the primary ladies’s particular person champion from Stanford since 2019.

Regardless of ending third within the nation final 12 months, the lads’s staff hasn’t fairly lived as much as expectations after a number of key departures, together with 2022 NCAA champion Hicks. Previous to Friday’s race, the lads’s staff sat at twenty fifth within the nationwide coach’s ballot rating. The one different ranked Pac-12 staff was Colorado at No. 9; Colorado ended up in fourth on Friday. The Cardinal ladies had been extremely touted coming in, rating fifth within the coach’s ballot. Whereas Stanford led for a lot of the race, Washington took the lead over the closing stretches, profitable with a staff rating of 60. 

The boys’s staff was propelled to its victory by standout performances throughout the board. Robinson led the race from the beginning, reaching actual separation across the 5k mark and profitable his first Pac-12 championship within the course of. Senior Cole Sprout took third for the second 12 months in a row. Junior Robert DiDonato, who was the staff’s eighth runner for a lot of the season, had a profession day, ending ninth total. Rounding out the scoring runners, freshman Lex Younger took twelfth and redshirt senior Evan Burke took fifteenth, operating occasions of 23:17 and 23:20, respectively. Stanford’s non-scoring runners had been sophomore Zane Bergen, freshman Milo Skapinsky, sophomore Callum Sherry, graduate pupil Liam Anderson and junior John Lester, who completed in fortieth, forty first, forty fifth, 52nd and 63rd place, respectively.

The ladies ran in a stacked race; six Pac-12 groups had been ranked within the prime 25 going into the race. Stanford, at fifth, was the best ranked, adopted by Oregon State, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Utah. Bunnage led the staff and the race, profitable by six seconds. Senior Lucy Jenks was the second Cardinal runner to cross the road, doing so in 19:30.0 to take fifth place total. Sophomore Riley Stewart, redshirt senior Grace Connolly and senior Zofia Dudek all completed inside two seconds of one another in seventeenth, 18th and nineteenth. Stanford’s non-scoring runners included freshman Sophia Kennedy in twenty second place, graduate pupil Abi Archer in twenty sixth, sophomore Ava Parekh in thirty second, sophomore Nicola Hogg in thirty seventh and sophomore Caroline Wells in fiftieth.

The following cease for each groups would be the NCAA West Regional on Nov. 10 in Sacramento, the place they may attempt to advance to the NCAA Championship in Virginia Seaside on Nov. 18.