Sophomore Alison Lones leads the women’s team to fourth place in the Bridgestone-Pacer Invitational at USC Aiken. The team started, competed and ended the 6k race with a pack mentality approach

The women’s cross country team took fourth place Saturday in the Bridgestone-Pacer Invitational at USC Aiken.

The Bobcats had three runners finish in the top 20 in this sandy 6k course and with a total of 84 team points was awarded fourth place. Team points are calculated by adding up each team member’s place. The team with the lowest number of team points is awarded first place; in this case that was Augusta State with a total of 37 points.

Sophomore Allison Lones led the team for the third time this season with a time of 24:38, finishing in sixth place overall. Lones is happy to be in the lead again this week but will continue to strive to do better and shave time off of her run.

“It feels great, I guess I try not to focus on being the number one runner, I focus on trying to do better, and trying to encourage the other girls to do better,” Lones said.

Freshman team member Rebecca Shane came in second for the Bobcats for the first time in her career with a time of 25:37. She finished 15th overall.

“It was my first 6k; going into it I was really excited but a little nervous. I feel good about it now; it was a pretty good run,” Shane said.

The next three Bobcat runners, Victoria Dobson, Ashton Passino and Karissa Ekstrom finished together in 20th, 21st and 22nd place with the times 25:48, 25:49 and 25:49 respectively. According to Coach Samprone this helped to procure fourth place.

“The teams greatest strength, and this has been for the past several years, is how closely they finish together, our team tends to run in a very tight pack,” Samprone said.

This serves well against teams who have members who run really fast and then some who finish slower. Even if a team member is first to finish it’s the team’s score as a whole that decides what place they will be awarded. According to Lones the team decided going into the meet that they would each strive to stay close to a team member to boost their points and push themselves.

Overall the team and the coach are pleased with the results of Saturday’s meet. However, according to Samprone, the first, second and third places went to other Peach Belt Conference teams. Augusta State University came in first place with 37 points, Flagler

College took second with 60 points and the University of Montevallo came in third with 66 points. “The bad news is that we were beat by three Peach Belt teams, so we have some work to do shaving time off of our run,” Samprone said.

The team had an opportunity to preview the course they will be running in the Peach Belt Conference on Oct. 22. According to Coach Samprone, the course is much sandier than the runners are used to, and this will factor into their preparation for the conference meet.

The Bobcats will travel to Boston on Saturday, Sept. 26, to compete in the Codfish Bowl.

Posted by Alyson Crosby on Sep 22 2011. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.