Auburn Cross Country team finished strong Saturday at the 2009 Pre-Nationals which was hosted by Indiana State University.
The men managed to finish in sixth place while the women finished 23rd.
The team competed against major competition such as in-state rival Alabama and SEC rival Florida.
The top two performers of the men's team were junior Ben Cheruiyot and senior Felix Kiboiywo. Cheruiyot placed tenth with a time of 24:03.5 and Kiboiywo came in 14th at 24:08.4.
For the women's team, junior Holly Knight and graduate student Stephanie Barnes led the Tigers. Knight took 21st place finishing the race in 21:10.4 and Barnes finished 44 with a time of 21:32.0.
Senior runner Scott Novack said Pre-Nationals served as a practice run for the big tournaments coming up later in the season.
"Pre-Nationals this year was very similar to what nationals was last year in terms of weather and in terms of the course being a little wet," Novack said. "It's practice for what nationals typically end up being."
The event was attended by teams from around the nation.
"It's one of the biggest meets of the year," said head coach Mark Carroll. "You got teams from all over, a lot of the top-ranked teams in the country."
Carroll praised the whole team for making a strong showing over the weekend.
"The whole squad performed well," Carroll said. "Both men and women's team had a great outing this weekend. On the men's side, pretty much the whole team had super runs and on the women's side, mostly everybody ran up to their potential. Individually, everybody had a job to do and they went out there and did the job they were supposed to do and that's why we had a good result as a team."
Novack said he looked at the event as a gathering for meeting potential competition.
"It feels deeper than at nationals because everybody just there to try to get to nationals," Novack said. "Because that feels deeper, it just gives you that extra competiveness to practice, beating as many people as you can."
Novack looked at Pre-Nationals as a preview of what nationals should look like.
Novack said the whole team had put in a great effort at the Pre-Nationals and it was a good step forward for the team.
"We ran the way we ran according to our training and the results showed," Novack said. "We did well and we surprised several people who weren't expecting us to run that."
Knight said the Pre-Nationals opened the team's eyes to what they need to do in future competitions.
"As a team, we performed well," Knight said. "I think we learned that we have a lot of work to do training wise and the next meet leading up to conference and the regional are going to be tough with training."
The current roster includes nine members for the men's team and seven members for the women's team.
After their week off, the team will head to Oxford, Mississippi for the SEC Championships on Oct. 31.
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