DI Mountain Region Preview

The 2015 Mountain Region Championships will be held Friday afternoon in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The women’s 6K race is slated to get underway at 12 p.m. MT (2 p.m. ET) with the men’s 10K event happening an hour later.

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

Women’s Race

Team Breakdown

We’re finally going to have a No. 1 vs. No. 2 match-up in NCAA Division I Women’s Cross Country. And who could have thought it would have taken until the Mountain Region Championships for that to happen?

When the women’s race gets underway Friday at 12 p.m. MT (2 p.m. ET), No. 1 New Mexico faces its toughest test to date as No. 2 Colorado toes the starting line as well.

In three races this season – the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invitational, the Wisconsin adidas Invitational and the Mountain West Conference Championship – the Lobos have been sensational. New Mexico scored fewer than 33 team points each time out and put its entire scoring lineup in the top-15 of each race.

Then there are the perennially-strong Buffaloes, who flexed their own muscle this year. Colorado has only raced twice, but shined each time. The Buffaloes took second at the Pre-National Invitational (Michigan won) and then romped to a team title at the Pac-12 Championships, taking down Oregon and Stanford.

Five of the past six team titles have either gone back to Albuquerque or Boulder with 2012 serving as the lone exception when Weber State shocked them both. In fact, the Lobos and Colorado split the crown in 2011 when they tied with 84 points.

Can there be an upset this year? Doubtful – but let’s look at those other ranked teams.

No. 20 Utah, No. 24 BYU and No. 25 Weber State will likely jockey for third, fourth and fifth place. Chances of those teams being separated by fewer than 10 points is very likely based on their previous performances. All three of those teams competed four weeks ago in national-caliber meets and finished either sixth (Utah at Pre-Nationals), eighth (Weber State at Pre-Nationals) or ninth (BYU at Wisconsin).

Individual Breakdown

Take your pick between the New Mexico trio of Rhona Auckland, Courtney Frerichs, Alice Wright, Colorado’s Erin Clark or Air Force’s Hannah Everson. There is a 99-percent chance (and maybe that’s even a little bit low) the individual champion will come from that quintet of talented athletes.

Auckland and Frerichs have yet to win this season as they’ve been focused on the team aspect and had to contend with a pesky freshman (Boise State’s Allie Ostrander) in each individual race. Wright was the 2014 champion on this same course.

Clark has two wins on her resume this season – Rocky Mountain Shootout and the Pre-National Invitational – and finished fourth in the Pac-12.

Let’s not forget about Everson, either. Everson was runner-up behind Clark in Louisville, Kentucky and took third at the Mountain West Championships.

Men’s Race

Team Preview

You might as well slot two-time defending national champion No. 1 Colorado in for one of the region’s two automatic qualifying slots. There may be five other nationally ranked teams in the field, but all Mark Wetmore’s Buffaloes do is advance every year. Even if they don’t win, that doesn’t mean they can’t win NCAAs – after all, they fell to Northern Arizona in 2013 before winning their first of two national titles in a row.

The bigger question with the Buffaloes is who will run. Two-time NCAA top-10 finisher Ben Saarel hasn’t suited up for CU all season long but is entered this weekend. So, too, is frosh John Dressel, but whether he toes the line for two 10ks in eight days after racing no farther than 5K a year ago is also up in the air.

No. 3 BYU has been consistent all year long with a strong runner-up finish at Wisconsin and a good showing at the Washington Invitational in early October. Led by Aaron Fletcher and Dallin Farnsworth, the Cougars – like the Buffaloes – will likely try to qualify through the regional process with as little resistance as possible.

The real racing begins throughout the rest of the region.

UTEP ran all-out and snuck into the NCAA Championships as the region’s sixth-place finisher a year ago, but one year later the Miners are ranked No. 11 in the country and have some wiggle room to ease off the accelerator this Friday. The Miners have a dynamic duo in defending region champ Anthony Rotich and newcomer Jonah Koech leading their six-man roster.

Last year’s Mountain Regional produced seven NCAA Championships qualifiers, but the next three teams in the regional rankings – No. 21 Air Force, No. 25 Colorado State and vote-receiving Southern Utah – shouldn’t bank on that total this year. They’ll be racing hard like UTEP did last year to best ensure their NCAA Championships berths.

Air Force won the Mountain West by just four points over Colorado State. Both teams have strong frontrunners in Air Force’s Patrick Corona and Kyle Eller and Colorado State’s Jerell Mock and Jefferson Abbey, and both are relatively equal in depth.

Southern Utah dominated the Big Sky with six top-10 finishers.

Individual Preview

Colorado’s contingent likely won’t go to the front and challenge for the individual win. In fact, Ammar Moussa and Ben Saarel finished higher in the standings at NCAAs a year ago (fifth and seventh) than they did at the Mountain Regional (ninth and 13th). All five Colorado scorers (including returners Pierce Murphy, Connor Winter, Moussa and Saarel) finished within eight seconds of one another.

Last year’s champ Rotich and Koech figure to be in contention once more for the win, but even they and their signature front-running Miner teammates might cool the jets this weekend as they prep for an NCAA Championships podium run.

Expect all those players, along with BYU’s crew, to be near the front and for the runners from some of the lower ranked teams (Corona/Eller, Mock/Abbey, SUU’s Hayden Hawks) to make the move that brings about the endgame.

While their Northern Arizona squad isn’t in the hunt for NCAA Championships qualifying as strongly as usual, watch out for the NAU duo of Tyler Day and Cory Glines, as well, along with Weber State’s Jason Kearns.