Big West At A Glance

• Up next for the athletes is the NCAA West Regional at Jefferson Park Golf Course in Seattle, Wash.  The women’s 6,000-meter run gets underway at noon and is followed by the men’s 10K at 1:15 p.m.  The top two men's and women's teams from the NCAA West Regional automatically advance to the NCAA Championships on Nov. 17 at E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kent. Individual and team at-large bids are also awarded following the nine regionals held around the nation on Saturday.

• Cal Poly captured both the men’s and women’s Big West Cross Country Championship, which took place at the UC Riverside Ag/Ops Course for the fifth consecutive year. The men’s team collected its second straight title and 12th in the past 15 seasons while the women’s program nabbed its first conference crown since 2001.

Placing five runners in the top 10 lifted the Mustang men to a first-place point total of 25, a 23-point advantage over second place UC Santa Barbara (48).  The Anteaters of UC Irvine finished third with 83 points and UC Davis solidified the fourth slot with 94 points.  Long Beach State recorded 147 points for fifth place and was followed by UC Riverside (155), Cal State Fullerton (182) and Cal State Northridge (227).

Laura Hollander’s record-breaking performance, along with three runners placing in the top 10, guided the Mustangs to a first place finish with 43 points, three points ahead of last year’s champion, UC Davis, who registered three runners in the top five to tally 46 points.  UC Santa Barbara secured third place with 75 total points and UC Riverside’s 81 points earned the Highlanders the fourth slot. Long Beach State finished fifth with 107 points and was followed by UC Irvine (177), Cal State Fullerton (196), Cal State Northridge (255), Hawai’i (283) and Pacific (286).

• Cal Poly’s domination at the 2012 Big West Conference Cross Country Championship last week, taking both the men’s and women’s title, carried through to the cross country annual awards.  The Mustangs claimed five of the six awards handed out by the Big West Conference, including men’s athlete of the year Chris Frias, women’s athlete of the year and women’s freshman of the year Laura Hollander and men’s and women’s coach of the year Mark Conover.  Blocking the Cal Poly sweep was UC Santa Barbara’s Bryan Guijarro, who nabbed the men’s freshman of the year award.

• Cal Poly’s Laura Hollander was named USA Track & Field’s Athlete of the Week after winning the Big West Conference Cross Country Championships in a course record time of 19:12.6.  Hollander ran a top time of 19:12.6, shattering both the course and conference record by forty-five seconds. The true freshman became only the second athlete to break 20 minutes since the Big West Championships moved to a 6K distance in 2003.