Quakers travel to Lima, Ohio for OAC Championships

On Saturday, we traveled to Lost Creek Golf Course in Lima, Ohio for the Ohio Athletic Conference Championships.  The goal for both teams was to score our best finish ever in the OAC-which meant a 3rd place for the girls and a top 5 for the guys.  The start of the girls race was delayed by 30 minutes due to frost on the golf course.  The team relaxed on the bus for another 30 minutes and finished watching Fast 5-so no problem!  The team seemed very relaxed and focused during our preparations on Saturday and I was cautiously optimistic about our chances for success.  The women ran a strong race to finish 3rd.  Annie and  Jenna went to the front and ran very aggressive races.  Annie and I had talked alot in the lead up to the race about her taking the race out fast and making people run with her.  I think she runs her best when she imposes her will on other racers.  I also thought the course set up well for Annie and our team.  The course was soft and muddy and had some challenging sections.  Annie ran to a 3rd place finish(not far out of 2nd), which is a career best.  Jenna finished in 10th to take 2nd team All-OAC honors.  Brittany Gibbons just missed All-OAC by 2 spots and ran a huge 6k PR.  Frehman Tricia Steffen finished in 30th and was the 7th Freshman across the line.  Karlee Michel closed out the scoring for WC in 45th.  We had a 36 second gap between our 4th and 5th runner and that is something we will need to improve at the Regional Meet.  The men followed at 12:30 and Senior Pat Carroll made his presence known at the front of the pack immediately. I was sweating a little around 3 when Pat fell back to 12th but was still in the front pack.  Pat worked hard for the next 1.5 and found himself in 3rd with 800 meters left and held that spot until the finish-moving up from an 11th place finish in 2010.  We looked flat on the men's side of things and ended up in 7th place.  I felt like we should have been no worse than 5th.  Marietta ran a great race to get 5th and BW was only 7 points ahead of us in the final standing.  We were hoping to show that we belong in the top half of the Conference and I think we had proved that all season until Saturday.  Now we have to refocus and bounce back for the Regional Meet and show the Conference that we are capable of better than we showed at OAC.  We had two notable races on the men's side-I though Freshman Jacob Boehm ran a strong race to finish as our 6th man in a personal best time of 27:56.  Freshman Joey Schoettelkotte also ran a PR of 29:20.