Men's runners take eighth at GNAC Championship
October 22, 2012
Jamie Foland
474-6807
Senior Tyler Kornfield and redshirt freshman Ross MacDougall led the Alaska men's cross country team to an eighth-place showing at the 2012 Great Northwest Athletic Conference Championship at the Ash Creek Preserve cross country course on the campus of Western Oregon University.
The five scoring Nanooks whose points counted toward the team score had a pack time of one minute, 34.72 seconds and tallied 207 points as a team to move up two spots from last year's 10th place finish.
"Everybody battled very hard and I was happy how the race went," associate head coach Matt Dunlap said. "It was a good day for Tyler as he finished his year of with a PR and his best place at the conference meet. It's always a plus and a plus to get both of those on the same day."
Kornfield, who competed in his final race as a Nanook runner Saturday morning, completed the eight-kilometer course in 26 minutes, 3.48 seconds to take 24th overall (23rd scoring). MacDougall was less than half a minute behind the senior as he crossed the line in 26:28.24, good for 33rd (32nd scoring).
Junior Tux Seims was third for Alaska as he placed 47th (43rd scoring) in 26:50.99. Rookie Michael Fehrenbach followed seconds later in 54th (48th scoring) when he clocked a time of 27:01.97 and junior Andrew Arnold rounded out the team score in 69th (61st scoring) with a mark of 27:38.21.
Freshman Max Olex and senior Lars Arneson also completed the race in 76th and 78th places, respectively. Olex turned in a time of 28:11.37 while Arneson completed the course in 28:17.09.
"The team has really made a step forward in how they've been preparing," Kornfield said. "It's taken a while but it finally translated into better results. I'm excited that this is my last race to go out on. This is the best result I've had in four years for my team and myself."
"It definitely helped that we tapered for this race," MacDougall said. "It was a really good field, we had a lot of really good teams at conference this year. We set pretty high goals for ourselves and we put it in our heads that we could move up and we did. The overall feeling is that we ran hard and did our best."
In-state rival Alaska Anchorage won the men's title for the third straight year as All-America runner Micah Chelimo won the individual title in 24:49.53. UAA scored five in the top-nine for a team score of 17 points., a new GNAC record for team points at the meet.
Following Anchorage was Western Washington in second (50), Montana State-Billings in third (103), host Western Oregon in fourth (112) and Seattle Pacific in fifth (140). Running down the rest of the team results, Simon Fraser was sixth (165), Northwest Nazarene took seventh (192), Central Washington was ninth (256) and Saint Martin's placed 10th (256).
Alaska now turns its attention to the NCAA West Region Championship, which takes place on Nov. 3 in Oahu, Hawaii