BETHLEHEM, Pa.—Fifth-year senior
Lydia Olivere (Wilmington, Del.) passed 15 runners during the second half of the race and led Villanova with a 26
th place finish in the Women's College Gold race at the Paul Short Run on Friday morning. Olivere recorded a time of 20:06.2 in the 6,000 meter race on the Goodman Campus Course at Lehigh and helped the Wildcats finish sixth in the team results. Villanova placed all five of its scoring runners in the top 73 out of a field of more than 425 competitors. The spread between the team's first five finishers was just 32.4 seconds.
Olivere's time of 20:06.2 is the third-fastest she has recorded in a collegiate 6,000 meter race and the third time in 18 starts that she has posted a time below 20:10. The race was a remarkably fast one in ideal running conditions, as each of the top eight finishers in the race had times that now rank among the 10 fastest marks in the long history of the Lehigh course. Each of the three fastest races Olivere has run in her career have come in either the Paul Short Run or the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional when it has taken place at Lehigh.
The five scoring runners for the Wildcats were the same as in the team's first meet of the season at Indiana earlier this month, albeit in a different order. Redshirt first-year runner
Emma McGill (Lebanon, N.J.) came in second in the Villanova lineup and was 42
nd overall with a time of 20:19.3. Three other Wildcats were separated by fewer than four seconds at the finish line. Freshman
Amelia Arrieta (Kansas City, Mo.) came in 69
th in 20:34.8, sophomore
Emily Robinson (Rogers, Ark.) was 72
nd in 20:37.3 and graduate student
Ariana Gardizy (Lansdale, Pa.) finished 73
rd with a time of 20:38.6.
Three of the five teams to finish ahead of the Wildcats in the standings are ranked in this week's national poll, including No. 12 North Carolina who finished first with a score of 63 points. Villanova was sixth with 279 points, coming in ahead of BIG EAST member Connecticut as well as Penn and Princeton among other Mid-Atlantic Region teams in the race.
Sophomore
Margaret Carroll (Mount Wolf, Pa.) and junior
Anna Helwigh (Soborg, Denmark) rounded out the seven runners in the Wildcats lineup. Carroll finished 167
th overall (21:20.7) and Helwigh came in 198
th (21:30.0) after moving up 37 spots during the second half of the race.
Villanova will next compete in the Penn State National Open on Friday, October 14 at 10:45 a.m.
