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SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Santa Clara cross country made its final 2014 race at Baylands Park a memorable one Saturday morning by totaling nine PR runs, including a school record 23:52.5 by senior Kurt Ruegg in the men's 8k race of the West Coast Conference Championship. Led by Grayson Murphy, Santa Clara's top five runners on the women's side all set personal best 6k times and Ruegg led a men's side that also had its third, fourth and fifth place runners set personal best 8k times.
"Today culminated with by far our best effort of the year," head coach Felipe Montoro said. "I'm really pleased with everyone's effort today. The top eight or nine runners [overall] all beat the old course record, so it was a really fast day."
Ruegg (16th overall) and the men finished in fifth place out of nine teams with a school record cumulative time of 122:28 (24:30 per runner). Murphy and the women finished in seventh place out of 10 teams with a cumulative time of 109:43 (21:55 per runner).
"You can go out a lot harder than other courses," Ruegg said when asked what he learned from racing at Baylands the first two times. "You can really just blast the first mile and it's flat enough that you're not going to hit a wall."
"I really wanted to have nothing left at the end and make sure I gave it my all," Murphy said. "This is our most important race of the year aside from regionals so I wanted to put it all out there."
Men's 8k
Kurt Ruegg 23:52.5
Bryan Crook 24:22.9
Adrian Hinojosa 24:36.2
Joey Berriatua 24:40.7
Ryan Greenough 24:53.8
Peter Stephens 25:13.3
Noah Westfall 25:49.5
Sean Roe 26:03.0
Tony Ferrari 26:13.8
"The first mile, we definitely hung together as a pack, which was awesome," Berriatua said. "We really feed off that energy with eachother. The fact that we all PR'd is spectacular."
Women's 6k
Grayson Murphy 21:30.9
Kelly Ryan 21:41.5 5:50
Hannah Wood 21:43.9 5:50
Kaitlyn Kuehn 22:07.6 5:57
Amia Nash 22:28.2 6:02
Elsa Valenzuela 22:48.7 6:08
Audrey Hiatt 24:09.5 6:29
Marisa Rudolph 24:18.3 6:32
"Everyone PR'd by at least 10 seconds which is really good," Ryan said. "It was easily our best team time and team race of the year."
Up Next
The Broncos race on consecutive weekends — Sat., Nov. 8 at the Doc Adams Invitational in Davis, Calif. and Fri., Nov. 14 at the NCAA West Region Championships in Stanford, Calif.
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