SAN ANTONIO – The University of the Incarnate Word women's and men's cross country team picked up top three finishes in the UIW Invitational on Friday, September 13 at the Windcrest Golf Club. Freshman Chiara Judis led the women's side with a second-place finish, while veteran Griffin Neal finished in first to lead the men's side. This year's meet included UTSA, Northern Colorado, Texas A&M Int'l, Texas A&M Kingsville, conference foe UTRGV, Texas State, Trinity University and Our Lady of the Lake University. All results can be found here.
After finishing in first at the UIW Twilight, the women's team finished in third place. Two Cardinals finished in the top ten with Judis taking second and Marie Vazeilles finishing in tenth.
"I think the women had a nice hard effort this morning as they worked up from the 4k last meet to the 5k this week," said head coach Dr. Derek Riedel. "We didn't do as good of a job keeping our pack together this morning and that hurt our team performance, but I know they can keep a tight pack as we move through the year because they do such a good job of it in practice, and they really value each other. I'm proud of Chiara's effort and Marie ran a strong race to finish as our number 2 this morning."
The men's team dominated the field with all seven runners finishing in the top ten. Neal (1st), Christopher Daniels (3rd), James Butler (4th), Jared Laverty (5th), Eric Pineda (6th), Anthony Zapata (7th), and Bryan Mileski (9th) controlled the race from start to finish.
"The plan coming into this morning was to hold back, keep our 1-10 pack as tight as possible and move together and negative split the race. We decided to race in training shoes so that we would be forced to be more conservative. The men executed the plan perfectly. I believe we had an 11 second gap 1-8 and if you go to ten guys it was 15 or 16 second gap but overall, they still ran fast with the conservative, team minded focus. As we move forward, we will scale training back so we can feel fresher going into races and once the spikes go on, they'll feel even faster."
The Cardinals are back in action on September 28th at the OK State Jamboree in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
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