By Hailey Bayne ~ Guest Writer
University of Lynchburg men’s and women’s cross country teams dominated the ODAC championship on Saturday at Washington and Lee. This was the first conference title since 2012 for the men’s team and 2009 for the women’s.
Despite weather challenges due to heavy rain in the days prior to the meet both teams accumulated just 48 points. The Hornets women displayed 26 points to the Generals with 33 and the men with 22 points compared to the Generals with 23.
Max Sparks, the previous winner of the 2019 men’s ODAC race, also placed first this year finishing with a time of 26:28.3. He finished just 0.8 seconds ahead of teammate Frank Csorba who took second place.
Sparks was enthusiastic about his second career championship, stating, “It’s a great feeling, it’s something that doesn’t happen a lot so I’m just happy that I was given the opportunity to be a champion, but also it just shows that it’s taken a lot of work to get there, and there’s still a lot more I still want to give to the team.”
Kelsey Lagunas, a junior, won the ODAC individual cross country championship with a time of 23:28.8, the first individual champion since Jennie Pernisi in 2010. Stephanie Burnett finished third and also earned the ODAC/Virginia Farm Bureau Insurance Scholar-Athlete award.
This meet also happened to be the Code Red game for Cross Country; however, due to the location of the event, the race was streamed on the scoreboard on Shellenberger Field for the students to attend.
Junior Jordan Brown stated, “I honestly didn’t even know that they did Code Red when it wasn’t here, so it was definitely different. But I think it was cool they were able to still do something with it, but yeah it was much different. It didn’t give them (the players) the Code Red feeling because we couldn’t be there.”
The Hornets are now looking forward to the NCAA Division III South Regional meet which is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 13 in Spartanburg, S.C.
For more information on the cross country programs at the University of Lynchburg, please visit https://www.lynchburgsports.com/sports/xc/index.
