The men’s cross country team won’t be participating in the L & C Pioneer Open this weekend.

Head coach Matt Hart has opted to take a bye week and spend Saturday training his team for the following meet where they will be heading down to Corvallis for the Beaver Open Oct. 22.

The men’s cross country team finished seventh place with 184 points at the Clark Invite, which took place in Battle Ground, Wash., Saturday.

Alex Dominquez-Morales led the team with a time of 27:49, a three-second improvement from his Willamette Invite time. Even with this improvement from the last meet, Hart said that Dominquez-Morales isn’t performing at the level he wants to be performing at.

Alejandro Boyles and Isaac McNutt were the other top two runners. Boyles finished with a time of 28:43 and McNutt tied his time at the Sundodger Invite with 29:02.

All of the NWAACC participated in the Clark Invite. Hart said the reason for this was because it’s the location of the NWAACC Championship that will take place Nov. 12.

“That’s why we went and that’s I think why everyone else went, just to get familiar with the course. It’s a good idea to go through the course. That’s another reason why the performance might not have been great because we were just doing this as a practice meet,” said Hart.

Hart said he was happy about the fact that the team was running together. They worked on it during the practice leading up to the meet.

“We did really well halfway through the race. Our team was running together.”
Hart added, “Our training week has been really challenging. All those factors led them to not do as well near the end.”

Hart said that it would be nice to have a Mt. Hood Community College showing when the team runs in the NWAACC Championships this November. “The championships are only an hour away. It’d be great if we could get people from Mt. Hood to show up. The team is in the process of rebuilding, but it’d be nice to have people there representing the college. There’s an excitement level to the championship meets for cross country that you just don’t get in the regular meets.”