Final Results

BEREA, Ohio – The Otterbein University women's cross country team made a piece of school history Saturday morning, winning its first-ever Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) Championship during the league event at Cleveland Metroparks.

The Cardinals, nationally-ranked all season until recently dropping out of the poll, placed four runners in the top-10 to win the meet, which was hosted by Baldwin Wallace University.

"That was a great team effort today," head coach Dara Ford said. "These women set the goal to win the conference at the beginning of the year and it feels really good to reach that goal. It's always a challenge to have a target on your back, but they ran a tough race."

John Carroll University came in 13 points behind Otterbein to finish second while the University of Mount Union took the third position.

Otterbein was once again led by freshman standout Claire Lamb, who was unfortunately edged down the stretch by Ohio Northern's Emily Richards to settle for second individually. Lamb, running her first race in over a month after resting a slight injury, came in less than two seconds behind Richards with a time of 21:58.3.

Senior Victoria Konkle turned in the second-best time of her career, covering the 6K distance in 22:43.7 to earn a fifth-place finish. Junior Julissa Poullet was exactly six seconds behind (22:49.7) to take sixth while classmate Alex Winter posted a 10th-place result in a time of 22:59.7.

Junior Meredith Wesco also ran well, crossing the finish line in 17th by going 23:14.3 to round out the Otterbein top-5.
Lamb, Konkle and Poullet each earned first-team All-OAC honors as a result of being in the top-9, while Winter and Wesco garnered second-team recognition for finishing between spots 10-18.

"It feels good knowing we will finally put an OAC Championship banner up," Ford added with excitement. "We will now focus on regionals and try to earn that national bid."

Freshmen Erin Simko, Kira Judd and Katy Foltz also ran admirably, finishing in 24th, 26th and 27th-place, respectively, to compliment the Cardinal output.

Otterbein will now gear up to compete at the NCAA Great Lakes Regional on Saturday, Nov. 14., which will be hosted by Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, Ind.