For a second-straight year, Baylor women's cross country senior Maggie Montoya won the individual title at the Bear Twilight Invitational Thursday at the H.O.T. Soccer Complex. The men's squad was led by junior Eric Anderson, who placed third overall.
The event was almost cancelled due to lightning in the area that made meet organizers remove all participants from the field of competition at 5:45 p.m. The threat of lightning didn’t clear until 7:11 p.m. and at that time the decision was made to give teams an abbreviated warmup time and start the women’s race at 7:40 p.m. Meanwhile, the men’s race would be shortened from 6,000 meters to 4,000 meters and start just 10 minutes after the women’s opening gun to avoid darkness.
Individually for the women, Montoya secured the meet crown with a time of 13:44.2, while senior Peyton Thomas (13:52.2) was second and freshman Anna West (14:06.6) was sixth overall, in the 4,000-meter race.
In the men's race, Anderson (12:17.2) was the lead Bear with the third-place finish, while Jeff Kirwin (12:29.8) and Henry Huff (12:33.3) were 10th and 14th overall, respectively.
In a change from previous years, the team portion of the race was scored as a dual-meet where teams faced off against one another head-to-head instead of being judged against the entire field.
The BU women won their two head-to-head contest with SMU (28-29) and TCU (17-40).
Meanwhile, the men went 1-1 on the night with a victory over TCU (15-40) and a loss to North Texas (35-20).
HIGHLIGHTS
• Baylor had a total of 19 girls competing in the event, while the men only had five runners.
• Montoya was BU's first individual back-to-back champion since Rachel Johnson won it in 2012 and 2013. She claims BU's ninth individual title in the 10-year history of the event, joining Johnson (2), Cate Westenhover (2) and Nichole Jones (3).
• There were five men's teams (Baylor, Incarnate Word, North Texas, TCU, and Texas State) and six women's teams (Baylor, Incarnate Word, North Texas, SMU, TCU, and Texas State) at the meet.
• The women's other scoring runners included Gabby Satterlee (14:09.4) and Kathryn Foreman (14:49.3).
• Baylor's fourth and fifth-place runners on the men's side were Matt Parham (12:33.8) and Sean McCullough (12:40.1).
• Both the Baylor women (Lindsey Bradley, Alex Davis and Madie Zimmerman) and the BU men (Matt League and Jordan West) didn't run several of their top runners.
STAT OF THE MEET
9 -- The number of individual titles the Baylor women have claimed in 10 years of Bear Twilight action.
TOP QUOTE #1
"It really didn’t look we were going to be able to run with the weather, but it was great to get a race in. I am happy with where we are at, but we need to get a couple people back. We know what Maggie and Peyton are going to do and then Anna West ran really well and Gabby ran really well too. We held out two big ones in Lindsey Bradley and Alex Davis, so we may have even a little more depth than maybe we did two years ago." -- head coach Todd Harbour on the women's top performers
TOP QUOTE #2
"I am really pleased with the way my guys got out there and competed. That was a really exciting race. Shortening the race to a 4K really spiced things up. I am just really pleased with how the race came together. Eric is in pretty good shape. He comes in in good shape. He does his homework over the summer and he was able to show that, but we have a lot of guys right behind him and that is exciting." -- assistant head coach Jon Capron on the men's team
WHAT'S NEXT
Both the men and women will have next weekend off, before taking part in the Ken Garland Invitational on Sept. 17 in Denton, Texas.
