CARY, N.C.—In her first official competition in just over a year, junior Lydia Olivere (Wilmington, Del.) ran a steady race from start to finish and came in third at the BIG EAST Cross Country Championships Presented by Jeep at WakeMed Soccer Park Field on Friday morning. Olivere and sophomore Anna Helwigh (Soborg, Denmark) each earned All-BIG EAST honors for being among the top 20 overall finishers in the field of 93 runners. The conference meet was the first BIG EAST championship of the 2020-21 academic year due to the COVID pandemic.
 
Olivere covered the 6,000-meter course in 20:36.1 and tallied a top-10 individual finish for the third straight year at the conference championships. She was the defending champion from 2019 entering Friday's meet and also came in seventh as a freshman in 2018. Villanova competed with six runners in its lineup as the program manages the confluence of the cross country and indoor track & field seasons along with the upcoming outdoor track & field campaign in the span of just a few weeks.
 
The second runner across the finish line for the Wildcats was Helwigh, who came in 20^th in 21:13.2 and earned second team All-BIG EAST recognition. It was a strong season debut for the Villanova sophomore as she moved up 11 spots from where she finished as a freshman in 2019. Helwigh is now a four-time All-BIG EAST performer overall, counting Friday's finish along with three all-conference honors from the 2020 indoor track & field conference championships.
 
Sophomore Brynne Sumner (Canton, Ga.), freshman Elizabeth Vaughn (Dayton, Ohio) and senior Kaleigh Hughes (Needham, Mass.) were the Wildcats other scoring runners. Sumner came in 27^th overall in 21:37.1, while Vaughn was 41^st in her collegiate debut (22:10.7) and Hughes came in 47^th (22:21.8). Sophomore Nikki Merrill (Portsmouth, R.I.) rounded out the Villanova lineup with a time of 22:58.6.
 
There are portions of the course at WakeMed Soccer Field Park that are run on flat ground, but the race begins with an 800 meter downhill portion and requires the runners to make two passes up a long uphill approach to the finish line. Olivere began the race near the front of the pack and then settled into the chase pack once the runners began to string out midway through the race. Officials splits showed that she was in sixth place at the midpoint of the 6K race and was in fifth with 1300 meters left.
 
Villanova finished fifth in the team standings with 131 points.