Colorado University Athletics
Colorado
Rocky Mountain Shootout
Buffs Capture Shootout Titles
September 30, 2006 | Cross Country
The Colorado men's and women's cross country teams kicked off the 2006 season with a pair of victories at the Rocky Mountain Shootout Saturday morning at the Buffalo Ranch at South Campus in Boulder. The women competed against
Junior Stephen Pifer was the top finisher for
“I was thinking this year I would give myself a little more push at the end to try and pick it up. I have some more mental preparation I need to do to get ready for the rest of the season. I ran a nine second PR, so any time you run your best time you ever have on a course, you cannot be too disappointed,” Pifer said.
“One guy who really showed up for us today was Seth DeMoor,” said Pifer.
Sophomore Seth DeMoor, competing in his first collegiate race after a season ending injury his freshman year, crossed the line in eighth place with a time of 25:35. He was CU's second racer to cross the finish.
“I took some huge steps,” DeMoor said. “I put in a solid summer and have stayed healthy. That is the whole trick to this sport is to stay healthy.
“I don't want to make any predictions about the rest of the season. It is too early to draw any conclusions right now. Today wasn't our best showing, but we'll be ready for pre-nationals and we'll be ready to go once the conference season rolls around.”
Colorado Head Coach Mark Wetmore also noticed the surprise performance out of the young sophomore.
“Definitely a big round of applause for Seth, he had the day of the day,” Wetmore said. “He is new to this level of running and sometimes it is hard for new people to keep it up through three or four races, but he is running great right now and I sure would like to get him to November running that well.
“Our team needs to get a little bit fitter and narrow down their focus a little bit. I'm not concerned about our preparation for November,” said Wetmore.
Other high finishers for the men's team were juniors Brent Vaughn and James Strang, finishing in ninth (25:39) and 11th (25:53) respectively.
On the women's side, the Buffaloes finished with a one-two punch by sophomore Jenny Barringer in first (20:51) and junior Liza Pasciuto in second (21:19). Both were personal record times.
“I went out and wanted to start out reasonably to see how I felt,” Barringer said. ”I was surprised I went through the mile at 6:10 and didn't have a pack with me. I expected some of the top CSU women and out of state women to come up and compete with me and I was surprised I ran wire to wire.”
Pasciuto ran a strategically conservative race to finish second in the shootout.
“The most important thing was just to get around the course and stay healthy,” Pasciuto said.
When asked about the state of the women's team, Pasciuto replied, “We had a couple of good surprises, we knew our freshmen would do well and they seemed to do really well. This course is so hard to predict the future.”
Wetmore was impressed with the performance of his women's team.
“We had a good time for Jenny and a deliberately conservative race for Liza,” he said. “The two freshmen looked very good and we saw a wonderful improvement by Erin Marston. This is a team which is going to improve a lot through the year. The freshmen are truly critical to our team.”
The two freshmen Wetmore was talking about were Claire Maduza, who finished in fifth (21:27), and Aislinn Ryan, who crossed seventh at 21:32. Senior Erin Marston was another high finisher, coming in at 12th with at time of 21:49.
In the men's open 8K race, which was the first race of the day and open to non collegiate racers,
Along with the Division I races held today, non-Division I teams competed.
“Adams State is a motivated, hard training, scrappy team,” Wetmore said. “They came here to run a hard race and they did.”
The next action for the Buff harriers will come on Oct. 7, at the Tiger Invitational in Hays, Kan. Colorado will send its “B” team as the varsity team's next competition will be at Pre-Nationals on Oct. 14 in Terra Haute, Ind., the side of the NCAA Championship.
