Ball leads runners to 14th place
the pre-national meet Saturday.
Senior Trever Ball, of Hyrum, led all USU runners with a time of 23:57 and a 10th place overall finish.
His performance at the pre-national event earned him, for the fourth time this year, the Western Athletic Conference Cross Country Athlete of the Week.
Tim Marshall of Louisana Tech is the only other recipient of the award this year.
“Trever did a great job,” Head Coach Gregg Gensel said in a press release on Saturday. “He represented us very well and I was pleased with his performance.”
In 2004, Ball took the Big West title en route to becoming the conference’s Male Cross Country Athlete of the Year.
Prior to the race on Saturday, Ball and the coaching staff were optimistic going into the race, but did not anticipate a tenth place finish.
“I think Trever has shown he can run with the best in the country. A top-20 finish for him is definitely a possibility and I know that he wouldn’t want anything less,” assistant coach Steve Reeder said in a press release a day before the event.
In addition to Ball’s performance, Logan High alumnus Clark Bryner finished 21st for the USU men with a time of 24:17.
Ball and Bryner were the only two of the USU men’s runners who broke the 25-minute mark.
Nationally third ranked Stanford won the race with a team score 86 points.
BYU tied for fourth place with North Carolina State at 209 points. The 14th-placed Aggies had a team score of 422.
The Aggie women didn’t fare as well as their male counterparts, with a 21st-place finish and 567 team points at the pre-national meet Saturday.
“I was pleased with how the women ran, but we have some work to do,” Gensel said in the Saturday press release. “Overall, I thought we had a very good day.”
Senior Tiffany Strickland was the top runner for the lady Aggies, with a 38th-place finish. However, Reeder said before the race he was expecting Strickland to finish in the top 20.
Among the women, Strickland was the only Aggie to finish in the top 100.
The WAC championships on Oct. 29 is the next meet for the team.
Last year, while competing in the Big West, the Utah State men took second place and the women took third in the conference championships.
Last year’s Big West champion, Ball, and runner-up, Bryner, will attempt to bring home a second individual conference title in two years in two different conferences.
-cmoffit@cc.usu.edu