Eastern Washington University's men's and women's cross country teams have their regular season behind them and they are now preparing to travel to Hillsboro, Ore., for the Big Sky Conference Championship on Friday (Oct. 29).

This year's conference Championships will be hosted by Portland State at the Meriwether National Golf Club. The races will begin at 11 a.m. Pacific time with the women's 5K championship race, followed by the men's 8K championship race at 12 p.m.

Live results for both races can be found here.

"We haven't raced many of the teams in our conference yet this year. We're really looking forward to seeing how we stack up," said head coach Sam Read. "We have seen growth and know that we have success coming, however, I think the maturity and experience the other conference teams have will make it hard to really see our true improvement this year. One thing both these groups have rallied around this year is not putting limits on ourselves. Whether that be limits from preseason rankings, weekly results, or who has the maturity and experience should win. We're going in and we're going to put our best race together; we are looking great and ready to
do just that. If we be our best selves, there are teams that we will beat that were supposed to beat us."

At last year's championships, the Eastern men's team placed ninth and the women's team placed tenth. These finishes came along with intense competition that is sure to follow again at this year's championship. Carter Ledwith was a top finisher for Eastern last year in the 8K race and will be competing Friday in this year's championship.

Both Eastern teams have many freshmen who have been heating up the competition. In their last final regular season meet of the year, the Eastern cross country teams split squads and competed at the Highlander Invitational and the Inland Empire Championships.

At the Highlander Invitational, Loren Linnenburger, a freshman, finished 51st overall in the women's 6K with a time of 22:05. For the men, Noah Hasselblad, who is also a freshman, made a bang and finished 18th overall with a time of 24:24.9 landing him in 10th on Eastern's all-time list.

At the Inland Empire Championships freshman, Madilynn Carr finished 44th with a time of 18:57 and sophomore, Alec Kness finished 67th place with a time of 26:39. The underclassmen have been dominating, as a freshman or a sophomore has been Eastern's top-finisher in all five meets so far this season.

"I think the conference top to bottom has gotten a lot better this year, including us. Many of the teams in front of us the last few years, that we have had our eyes on, got better. A lot have the fifth or sixth year COVID-19 returners have kept their teams strong, we're a bit different. On both sides, we have a young group with a lot of freshmen making a big impact right away, as we're racing four true freshmen for both teams," added Read.

After the conference championships are completed, the Eagles will send their top runners to the NCAA West Regionals in Sacramento, Calif., on Nov. 12.