WARRENSVILLE, Ill. - The Kalamazoo College women's cross country team competed in the Wheaton Gil Dodds Invite on Saturday (Sept. 16) at the St. James Farm Forest Preserve. The Hornets finished in eighth place out of 19 teams with 214 points.
Chicago won the event with 15 points, with Washington coming in second (58 points), Hope in third (81 points), Ripon in fourth (176 points), and Wheaton in fifth (193 points).
Paige Anderson paced the Hornets and grabbed a ninth-place finish out of 256 runners with a career-best time of 22:02. Haleigh Nower and Alisa Mason finished within 11 seconds of each other as Nower ran a 23:45 and Mason came in at 23:56. After shaving nearly three minutes off her career-best time last week, Nower set a new personal-best by 57 seconds.
Cate Cotter and Allison Nutt finished one right after another as Cotter had a time of 24:46 and Nutt finished at 24:47. Maddie Hanulcik and Annalise Bailey rounded out the scoring for the Hornets, finishing with times of 25:07 and 25:40.
Also running for the Hornets were Maya Alkema (25:44), Lucy VanDemark (26:34), Grace McGlynn (27:17), Mart Klenke (27:52), Zenaida Sackett (28:22), Madi Magda (28:48), and Annaliese Bol (29:30). Klenke was able to set a new personal best time by three minutes.
"Today, we faced a national-caliber field with a handful of the best teams in the country," said head coach Kyle Morrison. "We stacked up well overall, even though we had one key runner that had an off day. That set up opportunities for others to step up. Haleigh, Alisa, and Cate had gutsy races to keep us in the mix. Also, hats off to Paige on a top-10 finish! She is running on another level this year and ran so confident in a talented field today."
Kalamazoo will stay in Michigan on Friday (Sept. 22) to run in the Lansing CC Invite at Grand Wood Park in Lansing, Mich.