Huskies Bring West Regionals Back To Jefferson Park

Friday, November 10

Seattle, WA

10:30 AM

University of Washington

NCAA West Regionals

November 09, 2017 | Cross Country

Meet Notes

By: UW Athletic Communications

NCAA West Regional Championships
Jefferson Park Golf Course

Friday, Nov. 10
Women's 6k - 10:30 am
Men's 10k - 11:30 am

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Flotrack Live Stream

SEATTLE - Cross country weather has hit Seattle and the Huskies will look to thrive in it this Friday as the NCAA West Regional Championships return to Jefferson Park Golf Course. A total of forty teams from up and down the West Coast will be racing for a chance at team and individual spots in the NCAA Cross Country Championships, with the 16th-ranked Husky women and 20th-ranked Husky men determined to punch their tickets to Louisville.

The women's 6,000-meter race will be first on Friday starting at 10:30 a.m. The men move from 8k up to 10,000-meters for the first time this week, with that race beginning at 11:30 a.m. Admission is free for all spectators. Flotrack.org will provide a live stream of the West Regionals for a subscription fee.

The West Regional meet is one of nine Regional races around the country, all of which will take place on Friday. The top-two teams in each gender at every Regional automatically advance to NCAAs, making for 18 teams auto advancing. The next 13 "at-large" qualifiers will be determined by a process of counting up "points" that teams earned with wins over other NCAA qualifiers throughout the year, with the order of finish at Regionals also playing a large part. The NCAA Championships follow Regionals by just eight days, taking place on Nov. 18 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The West Region is full of NCAA contenders this season, as six women's teams from the region are ranked in the USTFCCCA Top-30, and seven men's teams are ranked, with three Top-10 teams in both races. Even ranked 16th, the UW women are seeded just fifth, as No. 3 Oregon, No. 4 San Francisco, No. 7 Stanford, and No. 11 Boise State will give the Dawgs a run. The Husky women have not finished worse than fifth at West Regionals since 1989, with six titles.

The men's field includes No. 4 Stanford, No. 6 Portland, and No. 10 UCLA, then Oregon at 13th, the Huskies at 20th, and No. 26 Boise State and No. 27 Washington State.

The Huskies have put themselves in good position for at-large bids to NCAAs if they run well this week. The women are coming off a fourth-place Pac-12 finish and earned a number of points towards NCAAs at the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational where they finished seventh. Amy-Eloise Neale has led the Huskies at every race this season, including a great third-place effort at Pac-12s that went down to the wire. Neale is the defending West Regional individual champion and this will be her final cross country race at home in Seattle.

Sophomore Kaitlyn Neal and senior Izzi Batt-Doyle have been the second and third Huskies across the line at the past two meets, with Neal finishing four seconds ahead of Batt-Doyle at Pac-12s and Batt-Doyle finishing eight seconds ahead of Neal in Wisconsin. Junior Emily Hamlin, coming off a career-best 36th-place finish at Pac-12s, will run Friday along with senior Anna Maxwell, 38th at Pac-12s to complete UW's scoring. Sophomore Nikki Zielinski, and freshmen Allie Schadler and Kiera Marshall are also among the group of eight women, of which seven can line up on Friday.

The last time West Regionals were held in Seattle, the Husky men's team fought through the rain and mud to knock off a couple top-10 teams in Stanford and Oregon and win their first ever Regional team title. Four Dawgs are back from that day, including seniors Andrew Gardner, Colby Gilbert, Johnathan Stevens, and junior Mahmoud Moussa. Gardner was 10th at that 2015 Regional and Gilbert was 12th.

Moussa and Gardner are coming off great runs at the Pac-12 Championships that earned them All-Pac-12 Team status. Moussa was fifth in Springfield, the second-highest finish by a Husky at conference since 2005, while Gardner finished a career-best 11th as the pair led the men's squad to fifth-place but just 11 points out of third.

Freshman Talon Hull has given the Dawgs a big lift this season and he'll look to transition up to 10k for the first time on Friday. Sophomore Andy Snyder has also made a big impact at the last two races, as he was UW's No. 2 scorer at Wisconsin and the No. 5 finisher at Pac-12s. The seventh spot could go to redshirt freshman Gavin Parpart or true freshman Tibebu Proctor.