Troy cross country finished the 2024 regular season with one of its best performances of the year. The Trojans had a total of seven top-50 finishes and 13 of the runners set their personal bests.
Sun Belt Conference Runners of the week Keith Warner and Alexiana Hinote powered the men’s team to a fifth place finish out of 11 teams, and the women’s team to a sixth place finish out of 15 teams.
“It was a really good day for both our men’s and women’s teams,” said head coach Brian Cunningham. “Our goal was to start the race off hard and be aggressive.
“We wanted to embrace being uncomfortable and we did exactly that. We were able to reap the benefits of that.”
At the start of the men’s race, it was 55 degrees, and the sun rose just four minutes before the men took off in Tallahassee, Florida. Warner, a sophomore from Charleston, West Virginia, led the way and finished 24th out of 121 racers with a time of 25:40.80.
Caden Blackman, Lane Watson, Patterson Graham and Riley Treadaway all set new personal bests and recorded top-50 finishes. Gavan Baxley finished just outside of the top 50 runners with a personal-best 26:42.40 finish. Zane McPeters and Caleb Locklin both set personal bests as well and finished 70th and 74th respectively.
Hinote finished in 28th with a time of 18:17.60 to set a new personal best. The freshman from Spanish Fort, Alabama has led the women’s team in every meet for the Trojans this season.
Makenna Calbert was the only other athlete on the women’s side to finish in the top 50 and ran the fastest time of her career at 18:30.30 to finish 35th. Reece Knowlton, Abigail Brown, Aisley McMeen and Abigail Carr all finished with personal bests as well.
Heading into this season, the Trojans biggest concern for this program was experience. 21 of their 25 runners are underclassmen with very little race experience.
“We have such a young team on both sides,” Cunningham said. “As we are able to get more races under our belts, we are going to become stronger.
“We started the season with a lot of racers who didn’t have much cross country experience, but now we are here, and we have raised the level of our racing and our training.”
The Trojans are taking a two-week break to prepare for the Sun Belt Championship meet in Foley, Alabama. This meet will take place on November 1 at the Graham Creek Nature Preserve.
“If any of us aren’t excited for the conference meet at this point, then we need to check our pulse to make sure that we are alive,” Cunningham said. “We have a lot of really good pieces here and we are going to spend these next couple of weeks to sharpen everything up and I’m excited to see where this group can really go.”
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