Rock starts season in Anchorage event

As the fall sports season begins, teams are preparing on campus at their usual facilities, except for the cross country team.

They will be in Alaska until Sunday and competed yesterday at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Both teams received lower than expected preseason rankings in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference with the men ranked sixth and the women ranked eighth.

The men have a very young team with no seniors on the roster after the graduation of Matt Mumford and Brian Ulrich at the end of last season.

The two captains of the team are junior Eric Geddis and sophomore Travis Arrigoni.

Along with Geddis and Arrigoni, the expected front runners for the Rock include Alex Koksal, Morgan Elliot and Michael Beegle.  

Geddis is confident that the men will exceed the preseason ranking set by the PSAC and finish near the top of the conference.

"I believe we can finish third or fourth," Geddis said.  "We are not surprised by our ranking, but we know we have a ton of potential."

He said there are freshmen who show a lot of promise, but that there is no way of knowing who is going to step up or not.  The majority of the team is freshmen, with the amount of juniors and sophomores being the same.  

The women's side is more experienced with four senior captains, Caitlin Hancox, Sarah Olesky, Kara Styles and Danielle Mostachetti.

Even with four seniors, some of the top runners from last season graduated.

Most notably Jen Harpp, who holds school records in the indoor 3,000-meter run, the indoor 5,000-meter run and the outdoor 10,000-meter run.

Hancox is expected to be one of the top competitors, along with Becky Belding, Stephanie Case, Abby Michaelian and Janine Powis.  

Hancox said that it is hard to predict who will be the most dominate runners because there are many young girls who haven't had the opportunity to prove themselves yet.

"It's hard to tell because we haven't raced yet," Hancox said. "We are definitely a younger team, but there is a lot of potential and I think we are going to exceed expectations and have a successful season."

Both teams are very young this season with single digits in seniors and an overwhelming number of freshmen and sophomores.

The men's team has only twelve runners, while the girl's team has forty seven runners.

Those numbers differ from last season when the women's team had 33 runners and the men had 18 runners.

While the team may be inexperienced, head coach John Papa is entering his 25th year with the program and assistant coach Bill Jordan will be entering his 7th season at the Rock. A new addition to the coaching staff is Christopher Sherve as a volunteer assistant coach after being the graduate assistant for the program last season.  

After the trip to Alaska, SRU will host the Mack Cooper Classic on Sept. 16 at Cooper's Lake Campground, followed by the Lock Haven Invite on Sept. 24.