Texas women’s cross country competed in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the Chile Pepper Festival, bringing home a first-place team win in the 5k race on Sept. 28. The top three teams of the race were Texas earning 42 points, LSU with 75, and Arkansas in third with 88.
When calculating the overall team score rankings, the awarded point values correspond to the placement of the top five individual runners from each team where the lowest score wins. For Texas, there were three Longhorns who placed in the top ten to define the win — all who individually recorded personal best times on race day Saturday.
Placing third in the race and first overall for UT, graduate Olivia Howell stepped up to secure the team win. Since taking first place and earning a personal best time during the Stormy Seas Opener last month, she cut nearly 50 seconds off her previous time. Her new 5k time was a 16:25.1 where before she ran a 17:15.2 time.
Senior Eva Jess and junior Elizabeth Pickett each ran a 54-second personal best. Jess placed fifth place with a time of 16:29.5 and Pickett ran 16:30.2, earning sixth.
Other individual Longhorns contributing to the win were 12th place finish from graduate transfer Elizabeth Stockman running a pace of 16:57.1 and freshman Sydni Wilkins placing 16th in only her second collegiate meet. Wilkins ran a 17:00.1, about 39 seconds off her time of the previous meet.
Outside of the top five individual placements on a team, the sixth and seventh place finishers are used if they place higher than another team’s top five runners. For Texas, sophomore transfer Melody Espinoza and junior Brighton Mooney placed 26th and 27th in the race and contributed to the score totals.
In only the first two meets of the season, multiple individual runners recorded huge personal best times from the previous meet to the race this past Saturday. The Longhorns are working for themselves as a team to consistently improve and get better as the new team in the conference.
“Setting the tone, not just for us, but how every other team is going to do in the SEC,” Howell said about joining the SEC. “We’re just looking forward to going out there and competing against teams that (we) will be competing against (at) regionals and also at conference.”
Texas heads to Chicago this week for the Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational on October 4th where Texas hopes to continue the team’s success this season.
