At this time of the season, it’s just a matter of getting better.

The BG men’s cross country team is looking to do just that today at the 8K All-Ohio Championships, hosted by Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware.

BG has won the meet five times in its 55-year history, most recently in 1986 in a tie for first with Miami.

The meet is just one of two remaining before BG will compete in the Mid-American Conference Championships on Oct. 31. The Falcons have had their eyes on the MAC championship all season, wanting to improve on their last-place finish from last season.

BG is a part of a 41-team field today and one of three MAC schools, alongside Akron and Ohio, to compete.

Only seven runners from each team are allowed to compete in the championship competition at 2:45 p.m. Chris Moody, Jason Salyer, Jesse Smuda, Jeff Ehler, Abraham Busienei, Johnstone Kirui, and Peter Miles will be BG’s seven to race. Ben Leininger and John Bernard will be the Falcons to compete in the 4:15 open race.

Malone University is the two-time defending champion of the meet. Last year BG finished 27th of 42 teams at the All-Ohio. The goal this year is to, simply, finish higher than last year, according to coach Cami Wells.

‘Our goal is to get everyone to do the best they can so we want to get the best team effort we can,’ she said. ‘We have all the meet results from last year and we use those to get them an idea of where they want to go this year, and so we’ll use that as motivation to show we’re an improved team from last year.’

The Falcons are coming off of an 18th-place finish two weeks ago at the Iona Meet of Champions. Wells said the course there is similar, both in difficulty and terrain, to the one they’ll race on today.

‘The course we raced last week prepared us well for this meet,’ she said. ‘We look forward to [the All-Ohio] every year. It’s a challenging course.’