The ASU cross country team heads south to Tucson Friday to compete in the Dave Murray Invitational, an event hosted by UA.
The Sun Devils, who enter the meet ranked 17th nationally on the men’s side and just outside the top 30 on the women’s side, are eager to compete at Dell Urich Golf Course and give the nation its first true look at how dangerous they can be.
ASU utilized their first meet two weeks ago in Flagstaff as a training run.
“On the men’s side, we’re going to try to go there and run hard,” ASU coach Louie Quintana said. “On the women’s side, with [the Roy Griak Invitational] next week, we have a short turn-around. We’ll run together and maybe that last mile or so we’ll try to run hard.”
The field will consist entirely of teams from Arizona. ASU and UA, the only Division I teams in the race, will compete against Pima CC, Grand Canyon, Mesa CC, Glendale CC, Paradise Valley CC and several smaller club teams.
Quintana says the heat will be a factor in the event, which begins with the men’s 4.25-mile race at 5 p.m., followed by the women’s 3-mile race at 5:45 p.m.
“We’re used to running in the mornings here,” Quintana said. “I think we’ll be a little conservative [at the beginning] and then kind of just let them go and compete.”
The women, who have had three consecutive individual winners at Murray, will come out racing to win but will try to stay together as a team.
ASU senior Anna Sperry won her first race in an ASU uniform at the invitational last year with a time of 17:03.
“We’re approaching this a lot like a work-out at the beginning. We’re going to focus a lot on sticking together as a group,” Sperry said. “If I were to win again this year, it’s going to come down to just a really good kick at the end.”
This does not mean that the Sun Devil women are having any thoughts of simply laying down for their opponents.
“We’re going there dialed up,” Quintana said. “With the women, obviously we’d like to win the meet, but I think on the priority scale it’s not the number one thing.”
Quintana will race 10 harriers from each team. He also plans to take advantage of the open race by having some of his younger runners compete unattached from ASU.
“It’s becoming more and more of a bigger thing for the women,” Quintana said of the rivalry with UA. “Their team is ranked higher than us right now, so for the first time going into this meet, we are the underdog.”
ASU’s strategy at the Murray Invitational will differ for the men, who have two weeks off from competition after Saturday. They will be heading into Tucson full throttle and looking to crash the Wildcats’ party.
“Our main goal is to beat UA,“ redshirt junior Daniel Lovell said. “We just want to stomp any hopes they have of beating us at all this year. If they think they can beat us, we want to get all of those thoughts out of their head right away.”
Reach the reporter at kyle.j.newman@asu.edu
