Women's ResultsMen's ResultsOverall Results POCATELLO, Idaho -- The ISU cross country team competed alongside multiple nationally-ranked opponents Friday afternoon at the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invitational, hosted by Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.
Women's Results The Bengal women's team competed in the first race of the event on a 5K course. Their top three racers, sophomore
Presli Hutchison, senior
Kylie Hutchison and senior
Katie Nicholls, all finished with sub-18 minute times and placed in the top 100 in a field of over 170.
"I have been waiting for [
Presli Hutchison] to do this all season," Head Coach
Nate Houle said. "She is extremely talented and her track times show it. She went out aggressive and hung on tight. I think it's a foreshadowing of things to come for her."
At the mile split, ISU was last in scoring, but a strong push in the second half of the race gained ISU two spots by the 4K split. By the end of the race, ISU's second-half push landed a 17th place finish.
"The whole purpose of coming out here was to give them experience running against a national class field in a huge group of girls that are incredibly fast," Houle said. "There are so many things to focus on besides running fast. I needed them to get their feet wet and experience what it feels like when you're in the middle of the pack running one of the best races of your life and there are still 50 girls in front of you."
Although the women were not running side-by-side, they finished with the sixth closest spread time (0:47.7) in the field of 21 teams.
As a team, the ISU women finished with a combined top-five time of 1:30:00, shaving more than a minute and a half off of their time in Bozeman two weeks ago.
Kylie Hutchison finished the race in 93rd (second among ISU runners) with a time of 17:56.3; Hutchison's time was welcomed by Houle, especially since the senior has not been training regularly due to injury.
"That a girl can basically not run this whole season, show up to a race and be competitive and go under 18 minutes is just crazy," said Houle. "It speaks to [
Kylie Hutchison's] talent level and her ability as an athlete to compete no matter what her circumstance is."
"I'm so happy that she was able to finish out the race," Kylie's sister,
Presli Hutchison said. "She hasn't been doing much [training] the last two weeks and just how well she did, I was super proud of her. Hopefully she continues to get better and that will be really good for us."
The four current nationally-ranked teams finished first through fourth in the women's race. New Mexico finished only one point off of the Notre Dame Invitational meet record with 29 points.
Men's Results The men's team finished 12th out of 18 teams in the gold division after a grueling five-mile race.
"I would say the race went out faster than I expected it too," said Houle.
The Bengal men also maintained a minimal spread of 54.1 seconds and 56 placements, to earn the eighth best divisional time spread.
Juniors
Ty James and
Tucker Boyd both had top 50 finishes for the Bengals out of the 150 runners in the gold division. James finished with a time of 25:18.6 for 26th place which was 48.8 seconds behind the winning time but only 10 seconds shy of a top-ten finish. Boyd finished 43 with a 25:34.7 finish time.
"
Ty James' shoe got stripped off about a half mile into the race," Houle said. "So he ran with only one shoe basically the whole five miles. He still was our top guy and still ran a pretty good time."
The men also showed improvement, running a top-five combined time of 2:09:07, just over four minutes faster than the 2:13:13 they posted in Bozeman.
Both the men and women are back in action next weekend in Cedar City, Utah for the Southern Utah Color Country Invitational.
The course the teams run in Cedar City should be identical to the course ran for the Big Sky Conference Championship.
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