Marquette Cross Country Squads Travel to Great Lakes Regional Championships

Milwaukee-- The Marquette cross country teams are gearing up to run in the Great Lakes Regional Championships to be held in West Lafayette, Ind. on Saturday Nov. 16th.

The No. 22 ranked women's squad is set to run the 6-K course at 11:00 a.m. EST while the men's 10-K race begins at 12:30 p.m. EST.

Last year, the women's team finished 3rd, missing an automatic bid to the NCAA Championships but later received an at-large bid. The men finished 13th.

The women will face tough competition as there are six other nationally ranked teams in the Great Lakes Region. Besides Marquette, the other ranked schools are Notre Dame (No. 5), Michigan (No. 12), Michigan State (No. 19), Indiana (No. 20), Toledo (No. 26) and Wisconsin (No. 30).

Coach Dave Uhrich would like his team to finish in the top-two, but is optimistic the Golden Eagles will capture one of the 13 at-large bids if they don't receive an automatic bid. He stressed how competitive the Great Lakes Region is.

"It's an incredibly wide-open year," Uhrich said. "We're just going to do the best we can on that day. We can't control how the other teams are going to run so we're just going to worry about ourselves and run the best we can."

The men's division is also very strong. There are 10 nationally-ranked teams competing, including -- Wisconsin, Eastern Michigan, Michigan, Central Michigan, Indiana and Notre Dame.

Uhrich says his goal for the team hasn't changed since last year.

"Our goal every year is to be in the top-10," he said. "That's our goal this year, but it might be more challenging than usual. One of goals is to beat all of the non-ranked teams."

The Great Lakes region is made of up 31 teams from all of the Division I schools in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan.