RCHS boys XC earns bid to Nike Nationals

It might not have been quite as good a race as they had hoped, but it was still very good.
The Rancho Cucamonga High boys cross country team finished third in Division 1 at the CIF State Championships on Saturday in Fresno, the best finish in school history.
Later on Saturday, coach Terry Tierney was informed that the Cougars got one of four bids from the state to run next week at prestigious Nike Nationals in Portland, Oregon.
"We had a better team time than the Division 2 champion," Tierney said. "After the power merge, we were behind them, but we both got to go."
The event, including travel expenses, is paid for by Nike.
It's a complicated process to earn a bid to Nationals that goes beyond team time or team score.
After all the divisions run Saturday, they take many of the top teams and "merge" the times together. Then they take the top few teams after that merge and merge them again, and find the top four teams. California gets two automatically, but there are also two at-large berths and California got those as well.
The top three teams in Division 1 got to go (Rancho Cucamonga, Mission Viejo Trabuco Hills and Arcadia) as did the top team in Division 2 (Santa Clarita Golden Valley).