D1 West Region Preview

The 2015 West Region Championships will be held Friday in Seattle, Washington. The women’s 6K race is scheduled to begin at 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET), while the men’s 10K gets underway an hour later.

You can follow the race on the National Results Wall, and via live results.

Women’s Race

Team Preview

This will either be a four-way battle for the title or an Oregon rout.

There is no middle ground.

The fourth-ranked Ducks are one of five nationally-ranked teams in Friday’s field. Four of them, including Oregon, are in the top-15 – No. 9 Boise State, No. 11 Stanford and No. 12 Washington. The other ranked team is No. 30 Gonzaga.

Let’s start with the most-likely scenario: Oregon steamrolls the competition.

The Ducks are as deep as they are talented and have yet to lose to a team in the West Region (23-0). Oregon finished second behind Colorado at the Pac-12 Championships and put its entire scoring lineup in the top-15. Earlier in the season, the Ducks finished third behind Michigan and the Buffaloes at the Pre-National Invitational.

What keeps Oregon from waltzing to a title? A lot relies on the ability of the Broncos and/or Cardinal to live up to their hype.

Since its shocking upset win at the Roy Griak Invitational, Boise State has found it difficult to replicate that success. The Broncos finished sixth at the Wisconsin adidas Invitational and second at the Mountain West Conference Championships despite an ultra-low stick from freshman sensation Allie Ostrander. Granted, the Broncos faced No. 1 New Mexico at the conference meet, but a better effort was expected in Madison.

Stanford is trying to get used to life without 2014 All-American Elise Cranny, who hasn’t raced in 2015 and isn’t entered in Friday’s proceedings. The Cardinal finished third at Pac-12s thanks to a first-place effort from Aisling Cuffe and took fourth as a team at the Pre-National Invitational.

The Huskies earned a win over Stanford earlier this season on the same course that they’ll be running Friday. Washington took second at its own invitational in early October and it was one of several strong efforts by the Huskies to date (fourth at Pac-12s, eighth in Madison).

The Bulldogs made their first appearance in the National Coaches’ Poll thanks to a win at the West Coast Conference Championships. Gonzaga beat BYU in a tie-breaker and surged from seventh to fourth in the region rankings as well.

Individual Preview

Knowing that a win would give their team the all-important single point, look for several of those runners from top teams to go for the win: Cuffe and Ostrander are the odds-on favorites and have yet to race against each other, while the Oregon duo of Alli Cash and Waverly Neer and Washington’s Maddie Meyers should all contend, too.

Let’s not overlook WCC champ Shelby Mills of Gonzaga or Bethan Knights of California, who are both gunning for individual spots at NCAAs. It should be noted that Knight hasn’t raced since the Roy Griak Invitational but is listed among entrants.

Men’s Race

Team Preview

No region in the country is loaded with more nationally ranked teams battling one another for NCAA Championships qualifying berths that the West: Five top-25 teams, two more receiving national votes, and two others that had been top-30 for points in the season before falling out. That’s not to mention a pair of teams sandwiched in between that did not receive national votes but are very much in the qualifying conversation.

Heading up the field are two top-10 squads in No. 4 Stanford and No. 7 Oregon.

The Cardinal are back on track after debuting their full “A” squad in a close runner-up finish in the Pac-12 behind No. 1 Colorado, but don’t expect them to come out firing on all cylinders this weekend. Frosh sensation Grant Fisher is reportedly not running this weekend, and the rest of the Stanford squad in Sean McGorty, Jim and Joe Rosa, Garrett Sweatt and Co. will do just enough to advance to NCAAs.

Same goes for Oregon. Two-time defending national champion Edward Cheserek suffered a rare cross country loss in this race a year ago to Stanford’s Maksim Korolev, but the junior likely already got that loss out of his system earlier in a Pre-Nationals defeat to Virginia Tech’s Thomas Curtin. Still, he and teammates Jake Leingang, Matthew Maton, Travis Neuman, Tanner Anderson and company will run hard enough to stay sharp while preserving energy.

The real racing begins with No. 17 Washington. Last year only five teams qualified from the West Region to the NCAA Championships. While that number isn’t fixed, it’s unwise for any of those teams ranked third in the region and beyond to rest on their laurels to assume as many as seven teams will qualify.

The Huskies, led by Izaic Yorks, were fourth overall at the Pac-12 Championships just 13 points behind Oregon. They’ll be boosted by the continued rounding-into-form of Colby Gilbert, who was 18th at Pac-12s in his first meaningful race of the season.

Washington may have finished ahead of No. 20 UCLA at the Pac-12 Championships (fifth), the Bruins – led by Lane Werley – did score a better finish at the Wisconsin adidas Invite in mid-October, ninth to 13th.

No. 24 Boise State also finished higher than Washington at Wisconsin, finishing 11th. The Broncos have since finished third in an exceptionally tight Mountain West Championships race in which the top three teams were separated by seven points.

Vote-receiving Portland is the reigning NCAA third-place team finisher and is riding a 10-year NCAA Championships qualifying streak, but this might be the year the Pilots are grounded. They were 19th at Wisconsin led by 48th-place Jeff Thies, and a decisive runner-up to No. 3 BYU in the West Coast Conference. Thies, Timo Goehler, Danny Martinez will need to run their best race of the year for the Pilots to stay aloft.

Conversely, vote-receiving UC Santa Barbara is going for just its third NCAA Championships appearance in program history and the first since 2006. The Gauchos were a strong 10th at Pre-Nationals and followed that with a hard-fought BIG West win over Cal Poly, 31-36. UCSB swept the top three individual spots with Bryan Guijarro, Anthony Ortolan and Shyan Vaziri.

Washington State (No. 6) and California (No. 7), a top-30 team for much of the season, are both ranked higher than Portland (No. 8) and UCSB (No. 9) in the final regional rankings, but did not receive national votes.

Washington State finished just 10 points behind No. 20 UCLA at the Pac-12 Championships with Cal – a team that had been top-30 for nearly all of the season before dropping out recently – finished another 20 points back in seventh.

Cal and WSU both squared off with UC Santa Barbara at Pre-Nats. Cal was seventh, UCSB was 10th and WSU was 13th.

Arizona State had also been ranked top-30 at points this season, but fell out earlier this season and hasn’t recovered. The Sun Devils most recently finished eighth out of nine at the Pac-12 Championships.

But anything can happen with all the chips on the table at regional championships. Stay tuned to see how it plays out.

Individual Preview

There are so many individuals who are going to up in that lead pack this weekend, it would normally be difficult to know where to start.

Not the case in this race as the entire race will likely key off of two-time national champ Cheserek from Oregon. If this race plays out like a typical Edward Cheserek race, expect a big, lumbering pack for more than half the race before a hard kick at the very end.

Here’s a rundown of the main men to watch:

• Stanford: Whichever of McGorty, the Rosas, Sweatt, Sam Wharton, etc., end up racing
• Oregon: Cheserek, Maton, Leingang, Anderson, Neuman, Blake Haney, Matthew Melancon, etc.
• Washington: Yorks, Gilbert
• UCLA: Werley
• Boise State: Michael Vennard, Elijah Armstrong
• Portland: Thies, Goehler, Martinez
• UC Santa Barbara: Guijarro, Ortolan, Vaziri
• Washington State: John Whelan
• California: Chris Walden
• Arizona State: CJ Albertson

Also looking to be up in that pack with a hope of qualifying individually – and they won’t know how far up they need to be with all these teams that may or may not qualify – are:

• Alex Short, San Francisco
• Troy Fraley, Gonzaga