Nov. 15, 2003
Men's Head Coach John Maloney
"I was happy with the results of our lads at the regional meet. We definitely had our season's best race as a team. Our top four runners ran well. Our plan was to have Pat Green and John Paul Thyken hold back and push our number fiverunner, but that quickly fell apart as Pat and JP broke away from them in the second kilometer. Pat was running comfortably and pushed ahead with JP in tow. Nick Arcelona pushed Chris Doerhoff for the fifth spot before fading in the last two kilometers and was passed by Michael Neumann. Pat left JP in the last half of the race, but JP hung on to stay near Pat the rest of the way. Ben Gauen ran strong and popped a school course record, eclipsing Nick Piziali's time (33:49 1999) from the only other time the Mission Harriers competed at Blue Lake Park. John Hinman, Pat, and JP also eclipsed the previous school course record. John was the biggest surprise for us as he had done alot of cross training the past month. He ran strong to the end of this 10K while improving his time from last season's regional.
"The team finished about where we expected in the team standings. We came close to Gonzaga, but showed improvement from two weeks earlier at the conference meet. In dual meet scoring against Gonzaga, we improved our deficit from 17 to 3 points. Our team time average gap went down from 37 seconds to 2 seconds. We have made this meet the most important race of our season and our training stressed its importance. The lads really rallied at the end of the season for this meet and impressed me with their character. They were down from their disappointing conference showing and were missing Ricky Brackett and Taylor Graham, but they stuck together and came out with their best race of the season."
