Red Raiders Sending 14 to Mountain Regional in Provo

Friday, November 9

Provo, Utah

TBD

Texas Tech Athletics

NCAA Mountain Region Championships

Red Raiders Sending 14 to Mountain Regional in Provo

November 08, 2018 | Cross Country

Watch Live via FloTrack

Red Raiders to run at NCAA Mountain Regional hosted by BYU.

By: Jeremy O'Brien

LUBBOCK, Texas – Texas Tech is set to send their top-seven runners from the men's and women's teams to Provo, Utah, to run in the NCAA Mountain Regional on Friday afternoon. The Red Raiders enter the weekend after placing both the men's and women's squads in the top-seven at the Big 12 Championships on Oct. 26.

"Big 12 was overall successful for the group," said head coach Jon Murray. "A lot of them had personal bests, so we're going to take that and get after this very tough region."

Currently, six of the top-25 programs in the country reside in the Mountain Region, including Northern Arizona and BYU, who rank first and second in the national coaches' poll, respectively.

The top two teams from each region automatically qualify for the NCAA Championships, but the strength of the Mountain Region will likely allow it to capture five additional at-large team bids.

"It looks like they'll take seven teams out of the 16 that are running, which is unbelievable when you consider there are other regions with 35 teams that will only get two," Murray said. "It's a difficult level of competition with the amount of quality that we have [in the region]."

Individuals may qualify for nationals if they are not on one of the advancing teams but did finish in the top-25 individually.

Going up against such a tough region means Tech will need to focus on running their race.

"We just need to get in and run our race," said Murray. "We know we're going at a bit of altitude and concentrate on each one of those loops."

Murray has studied the times that BYU ran at their home course for their home meet and the Mountain West Championships and noted how fast of a course it appears to be.

"It was really fast," he said. "It's either a little short, or it's just a really fast course at altitude. That'd be great to get more personal bests out of this while competing in one of the best regions in the country."

Tech will enter seven each in the men's and women's races. Representing the men will be Stephen Alvarez, Miguel Bautista, Luke Estes, Nathan Gift, Connor Hughes, Shea Whatley and Joacim Zuniga.

The women's side will be represented by Seselia Dala, Allison Halloran, Binta Ka, Arianna Lopez, Jazmyn Martinez, Bret Leigh Nance and Lauren Offerman.

The women's race will begin the day, kicking off at 12 p.m. CT. The men will go at 1 p.m. CT. The race will be streamed live via FloTrack here.