With the final results coming down to the wire, the Cerritos College men's cross country team settled for third place at the Southern California Regional Preview on Friday. Running at Chaffey College, the Falcons finished with 112 team points and were barely beaten out by eventual champion Bakersfield College (106 team points), while Moorpark College slipped into second place with 111 team points. Cerritos was able to hold off fourth place Riverside City College, who had 116 team points. In all, there were 27 full teams, as well as seven more who didn't field a full squad.

Next up for the team will be the Manny Bautista XC Invitational, which will take place at NTC Park in San Diego next Friday.

Running the four-mile course with 203 total runners created quite a few bunches of runners fighting for the best finish time and placing, which helped account for the team's overall scoring.

Leading the way for the Falcons was the duo of Joshua Melendez (St. Paul HS) and Louis Santibanez (Warren HS), who both finished in the Top 10 on the day. Melendez recorded an eighth place time of 21:30.7, while Santibanez finished in 10th place overall with a clocking of 21:33.2. He was edged out for ninth place by a little more than one second, which would have drawn the team into a second place tie.

Joshua Morales (Warren HS) was the third Cerritos runner to cross the finish line and he held off several runners to take 27th place in a time of 22:16.9, while teammate Tyler Villanueva (Warren HS) was one of those runners, as he placed 29th overall in a time of 22:18.1. Closing out the team's scoring was Jacob Cosio (California HS), whose time of 22:27.8 put him in 38th overall. He also missed out on jumping ahead of a runner by less than a second.

The team was also represented by Noah Addison (Long Beach Poly HS; 23:19.7; 67th place), Axel Rebolledo-Ynostros (California HS; 23:21.9; 70th place) and Matthew Alvarez (Warren HS; 23:49.7; 87th place).