Skieresz Breezes Past NCAA Field

Arizona sophomore Amy Skieresz dominated the nation’s best women’s college distance runners Monday to win the NCAA cross-country championships at the Dell Urich Golf Course.

At least that’s how most people saw it. Not Skieresz.

“On any given day, other girls could have won this race,” she said. “I happened to win today.”

Modest and diplomatic, but not very accurate.

Skieresz’s margin of victory was almost 100 meters, which is actually typical.

The Agoura High graduate won all seven of her races this season by an average of 30 seconds. Her winning time over the 5,100-meter championship course was 17 seconds faster than she had run over the same circuit on Oct. 19. She defeated second-place Marie McMahon of Providence by 16 seconds.

“I wanted it real bad,” Skieresz said. “I knew I’d had a great season, but the only way to top it off was to finish it right.”

Skieresz, who placed second last year, broke open the race at the two-kilometer mark.

“I didn’t know if they were going to stay with me, but I was just going to run my own race,” she said. “From 2k on, I said, ‘We’re going.’ ”

Arizona Coach Dave Murray’s plan had Skieresz surging at two kilometers and again four kilometers into the race.

Skieresz isn’t convinced she carried out the second part of the plan, but it didn’t matter. She had a 20-second lead on McMahon, a senior, and Notre Dame freshman Joanna Deeter.

“I never imagined that I’d win by that much,” Skieresz said. “I thought it was going to go right down to the wire.”

Skieresz is the first University of Arizona woman to win an NCAA cross-country title. She also is the first former high school runner from the Valley/Ventura region to win a Division I championship.

“It really hasn’t hit me yet,” she said Monday. “I’m just trying to take it all in.”

Two other former Marmonte League runners had top-10 finishes in the meet, which had 173 finishers in the men’s race and 176 in the women’s.

The others were Ryan Wilson of Arkansas, eighth in the men’s event, and Rikke Pedersen of Northern Arizona, ninth in the women’s race.

Wilson, a 1993 Agoura graduate, had hoped to improve on his fifth-place finish of last year, but he was never better than sixth after the midway point.

“I thought I was in good position early,” Wilson said. “But this just shows me that I wasn’t in the kind of shape that I needed to be to run with the top guys.”

Wilson ran 13:28.6 in the 5,000 meters during track season and was ranked seventh in the United States in that event, but he said he didn’t train enough over the summer.

Pedersen is a Danish exchange student who graduated from Simi Valley High in 1992.