Nov. 14, 2005

Palo Alto, Calif. - Karina Ortiz and Maria Blazquez finished in the top 100 to lead the Cal State Fullerton women's cross country team to a 16th-place finish at the NCAA Regional Meet Saturday at Stanford. Damien Nieves was the best finishing Titan of the day, running 69th in the men's race afteer a 93rd place a year ago, but the Titans didn't have five runners so could not place in the team standings.

Ortiz ran 74th in a time of 22:12.8 while Blazquez was 90th in 22:34.1. Completing the Titans' scoring pack were Carolyn Ellis (102nd, 22:43.8), Dahamar Perez (109th, 22:48.3) and Juliane Masciana (112th, 22:51.1).

Other Titan male finishers were Jason Graney (140th, 34:46.0) and Jon George (149th, 35:10.6).

"This was a great meet with great competition and I think we competed really well," said Head Coach John Elders. "This has been a very rewarding season for me because we had such a quality group of young men and women who were a joy to coach. As a program we exceeded expectations in many ways, and individually we had many athletes take their running to another level. All in all it was a very successful season for our program.

Arizona won the men's race and host Stanford captured the women's race. Other Big West finishers were men's champion Cal Poly in seventh, UCSB in ninth, Long Beach State in tenth, UC Riverside in 14th, UC Irvine in 15th and Cal State Northridge in 22nd. In the women's race, Big West champ UC Irvine was ninth, Long Beach was tenth, UCSB was 15th, UCR was 22nd, Cal Poly was 23rd and CSUN was 26th.