Round 1 of Running Rivalry Goes to Skieresz

The distance between them has decreased greatly since their high school days at Agoura and Thousand Oaks, but Amy Skieresz of Arizona had the upper hand on Kim Mortensen of UCLA last Saturday in the Pre-NCAA Championship race at Dell Urich Golf Course in Tucson, Ariz.

Skieresz, a sophomore, won her fourth consecutive race of the season with a time of 17 minutes 21 seconds over the 5,100-meter course to defeat Mortensen, a freshman, by 15 seconds and snap her collegiate win streak at three.

The victory was the eighth in the last nine cross-country races for Skieresz, whose only non-winning performance during that streak was a second-place finish in the 1995 NCAA championships.

The race might have been the start of a great collegiate rivalry between Skieresz and Mortensen, who are expected to race each other three times next month.

The next expected meeting between the two will be the Pacific 10 Conference championships at Stanford on Nov. 2, followed by the District VIII meet at Fresno on the 16th and the NCAA championships on the 25th.

Slowed down: Margarito Casillas of Arizona, the 1992 State Division I cross-country champion for Hoover High, will use a redshirt year this season because of a sore tendon in his knee.

Arizona Coach Dave Murray said Casillas has resumed training, but the coach wants to bring him back slowly.

“I don’t want to waste a talent like him for our big meets at the end of the year unless he’s 100%,” Murray said. “So we’ll bring him back next year as a fifth-year senior.”

Honor roll: Cindy Daws, a Louisville High graduate and a senior midfielder on Notre Dame’s top-ranked women’s soccer team, has been named Big East Conference player of the week.