Avena leads Pack to second-place finish
After a season that was plagued by injury to some of its strongest runners, the Nevada cross country team worked its way to a second place finish at the Western Athletic Conference Championship Saturday in Logan, Utah.“We had a race plan designed early in the season,” head coach Kirk Elias said. “We knew this race was going to be at altitude, so we worked on sitting back early and closing in throughout the second half.”
Christa Avena placed second overall and was the top finisher for Nevada. Fellow runners Samantha Davis and Natalie Jarawka both recorded top-10 finishes, placing fourth and sixth respectively.
Avena crossed the finish line in 17:10.35 at the 5K race and was just nine seconds behind Breanna Sande of Boise State.
Avena’s second place finish marks the second year in a row that a Wolf Pack runner has placed second in the championships. Sophomore Charlotte Schonbeck, who is currently out with a foot injury, finished in second place in the 2006 WAC Championships.
Junior Amanda Moreno was also out with a groin injury that was aggravated from a fall earlier in the season.
This year’s squad returned with only two runners from last season, but Elias said that even though this year’s team is young, it has depth and quality runners.
Davis, one of five freshmen on the team, took home WAC honors for Freshman of the Year.
In addition, Davis, Avena and Jarawka were all named to the All-WAC First Team.
“It’s a wonderful honor for each individual to be recognized by the conference,” Elias said. “We took four of the nine possible awards. That has to tell you that you are doing something right.”
For the first six-to-eight weeks of the season, Elias trained all of his runners extremely hard and said that they were very tired for the first half of the season.
However, he also said that it wouldn’t have mattered if they would have gotten last place in every race during the season – he promised them at the beginning of the season that they would run fast at the end.
“I have been doing this long enough that I can tell my kids that they will run fast when it counts,” Elias said. “It was not until we reduced the volume and increased the intensity that the kids started to get snappy.”
Idaho won the WAC with 39 points and Nevada followed with 65 points. Utah State came in third with 72 points and Boise State finished fourth with 95 points. Fresno State, New Mexico State, San Jose State and Hawaii rounded out the latter half of the field, finishing fifth through eighth respectively.
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