UCLA Sports Information Gina Donnelly is one of the Bruins who will be competing at Stanford this weekend.
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It looked good through the first mile.
Then it got ugly.
Racing at the Roy Griak Invitational in Minneapolis last Saturday, the UCLA women’s cross country team got out to a good start but couldn’t maintain its early pace and finished 18th among the 29 schools present.
“They just didn’t carry it through,” Bruin assistant coach Helen Lehman-Winters said. “They were definitely ready to run faster than they did.”
Led by senior captain Tina Bowen, the Bruins were doing well in the infant stages of the race. Bowen, however, fell back in the final two-thirds of the contest, and the rest of the team followed her into the back end of the field.
Senior Katie Nuanes survived the best, completing the 6,000-meter course in 22:08 for 47th place.
Bowen, who was UCLA’s No. 1 runner in the team’s first two competitions, was next, placing 68th (22:29).
Sophomore Kelly Grimes (110th, 22:59), senior Gina Donnelly (115th, 23:03), and sophomore Melissa McBain (123rd, 23:12) rounded out the Bruins’ scoring five.
Freshman Valerie Flores (148th, 23:34), the squad’s third runner at both the Fullerton and Aztec Invites, and sophomore Julie Barbour (154th, 23:39) were the remaining UCLA finishers.
“Bowen and Nuanes are normally so consistent and that makes us a good team,” head coach Eric Peterson said. “But if we don’t get a good race from the top three (Bowen, Nuanes and Flores), our ability to be competitive is going to be diminished.”
No. 13 Minnesota won the meet, tallying 98 points. Yale (127), No. 7 Arizona State (140), Arizona (146) and Providence (159) followed.
UCLA was a ways behind with 463 points.
Last year, the Bruins, who qualified for the NCAA Championships, finished sixth at this meet, squeezing three of their runners into the top 30.
Peterson, who expects his team to return to the national finals this season, said inexperience played a big factor in the dropoff.
“Until we develop athletic maturity, we’re susceptible to this kind of performance,” he said.
Peterson noted that his team ran well in races in which the runners could all see each other. At Griak, where there were 252 finishers, they were unable to do so.
That, he said, was a sign of the team’s youth.
Peterson added that most of the runners had trouble keeping track of where they were in the field.
“When you’re 40th, what’s really the difference between that and 80th?” he said. “As a competitor, there’s really no difference. You just know you’re getting hammered. It’s not until you see the results that you realize you cost the team 40 points.”
Nuanes, however, shrugged off the team’s poor outing. “Well, we can pretty much only get better from there. We have to learn from this race,” she said.
UCLA’s first chance for redemption will come tomorrow, when they race at the Stanford Invitational.
The Bruins will face six of the top 25 teams in the country, including No. 1 Stanford, No. 2 Wisconsin and No. 3 Kansas State.