Reigning Champs Look to Win Extra Titles at Sun Belt Championships

BOONE, N.C. – The App State males’s and girls’s cross nation groups look to defend their 2024 Sun Belt Cross Country Championship group titles on Friday as they make an look on the 2025 championship meet in Foley, Ala. 
 
The App State ladies, who’re in search of their second consecutive group title, will begin issues off with the ladies’s 5K race at 9:30 a.m. ET (8:30 a.m. CT). The App State males goal to seize their third consecutive group title and can compete within the males’s 8K at 10:15 a.m. ET (9:15 a.m. CT). The meet will likely be accessible to stream on ESPN+. 
 
Last Time Out 
The Mountaineers closed the common season with the Princeton Fall Classic on Oct. 17. Sophomore Thomas Wlazlowski set tempo for the Mountaineers within the males’s 8K, ending sixty fourth out of 318 opponents with a private finest time of 24:12.5. He surpassed his earlier private finest by 33 seconds. Fellow sophomore Aaron Kidd and redshirt senior Chase Burrell have been subsequent to cross the end line with instances of 24:25.2 (PR) and 24:27.5, respectively. All eight Mountaineers within the ladies’s 6K clocked private bests, led by freshman Josie Jackson, who clocked a time of 21:39.8 to put a hundred and fifth out of 270 opponents. Her time was a 32-second enchancment on her earlier finest. Fellow freshman Elizabeth McCart and sophomore Breanna Budizinski have been subsequent to cross the end line with instances of 21:41.2 (PR) and 21:50.3 (PR), respectively. 
 
Last Time on the Sun Belt Championships
At the 2024 Sun Belt Championships, the App State males captured their second consecutive SBC group title, and the ladies secured the sweep with their first group title since 2018. It was the primary time in this system’s Sun Belt period that the Mountaineers swept each titles. App State beforehand swept each league titles in 2012 as a member of the Southern Conference. In addition to sweeping the group titles, males’s distance coach Brad Herbster and girls’s distance coach Annie Richards have been named the Sun Belt Men’s and Women’s Coaches of the Year. Between the boys’s and girls’s groups, 10 Mountaineers collected all-conference accolades. Henry Stark and Breanna Budzinski collected Sun Belt Freshman of the Year honors and Chase Burrell earned the SBC Elite Award. 
 
In the boys’s 8K, 5 Mountaineers crossed the end line in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth place, scoring 30 factors to repeat as group championships, coming inside two factors of the Mountaineers’ 2023 rating of 28 (the bottom whole on the SBC Championships since 2013). Ethan Lipham led the cost, clocking an 8K time of 24:40.60 to complete fourth general. Chase Burrell positioned fifth (24:47.20), Calbert Guest took sixth (24:55.20), Henry Stark completed seventh (24:56.40), and Thomas Wlazlowski positioned eighth (24:56.90). Ethan Turner rounded out the highest 10 with a time of 25:02.10.  
 
With an 8K time of 23:52.80, Arkansas State’s Jacob Pyeatt gained the boys’s particular person crown. 
 
Jasmine Donohue led the Mountaineers within the ladies’s 5K, clocking a time of 17:18.85 to put third general. Lauren Johnston and Emma Russum adopted shut behind, inserting sixth (17:43.92) and seventh (17:46.34), respectively. With a time of 18:01.82, Lana Farris took thirteenth and Breanna Budzinski stopped the clock at 18:14.25 to complete sixteenth general. 
 
Marshall’s Kylee Mastin captured the ladies’s particular person title with a 5K time of 17:06.43.
 
The Mountaineers’ victories on the convention championship occurred a mere 35 days after Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, which brought on widespread injury to the Boone and Watauga County space. 
 
Up Next 
The NCAA Southeast Regional is slated for Nov. 14 and will likely be hosted by Virginia at Panorama Farms in Charlottesville, Va. The ladies’s 6K race is scheduled for 10 a.m. with the boys’s 10K to observe at 11 a.m. Parking will likely be ticketed at $20 and have to be bought on-line prematurely by Nov. 10.