As the Presidents’ Athletic Conference Championships have come and gone, the women’s cross country team has been preparing for the next meet of the postseason – regionals.

The women will compete at the NCAA Division III Mideast Regional Meet Saturday, Nov. 11. In the preseason poll, the women were seeded at fifth in the Mideast region. However, the team now sits at seventh place in the rankings, with the chance to run directly against the bigger name schools.

Head coach Chris Hardie knows the only way that the team as a whole can make it to the next postseason level – nationals – is to exceed their current ranking of seventh in the region.

“We have to get in the top five somehow if we’re even going to sniff nationals,” said Hardie. “That’s going to probably take a team score of under 150, so if we can put a couple of girls up front and then get the rest of the team under top 40 that puts us at 150-range. It’s still a little bit of a longshot, thinking ahead, like 150 doesn’t always get in, but that’s definitely our goal.”

The team is led by two frontrunners that dominated the PAC Championships just under two weeks ago at Westminster College – senior Angie Marchetti and junior Teghan Simonton.

“[Marchetti] knows she’s going to have get around the 23:40 range to get into nationals,” said Hardie. “Teghan also has a good outside shot if she has the type of race that we think she can put together.”

As depth has been one of the strong suits for the team in recent years, Hardie acknowledged that the team has plenty of runners to count on.

“I think Elinore Loch is running great and Malarie Yoder is looking to get top-30 or top-20 if she can,” said Hardie. “So we have a lot of options up front.”

The women have already run at the site of regionals, the Dickinson Long-Short Invitational, back in September where they finished 4th out of 17. Marchetti said having run the course in the past season and over the years will definitely be beneficial.

“Actually for all the seniors, we went freshmen year and sophomore year, so we had three or four races before this season,” said Marchetti. “I think that seeing the course and getting a feel for it makes us a lot more confident going into it and we know what to expect. We can also kind of envision it in our minds during practices.”

The Waynesburg women’s cross country team has a streak of individual qualifiers making it to nationals over the past two seasons. Senior Julie Gerber made it her sophomore year, while Emily and Katie Latimer made it last season during their senior campaigns.

Going into the season, Hardie and the women’s team made it one of their goals of the season to qualify for the Division III Nationals race as a team. On Saturday, the team has the potential to accomplish that lofty goal, or at least continue the streak of sending individual Waynesburg runners to nationals.