The UConn women’s cross country team will travel to State College, Penn. on Friday to compete at the annual Spiked Shoe Invitational meet.
The meet, which has been running annually since 1979, will celebrate its 45th birthday this Friday. In attendance will be Syracuse, Buffalo, Pitt, Temple, West Virginia, Navy, Princeton and Youngstown State, along with the host team Penn State. The meet will take place at the Blue and White Courses on the Nittany Lions’ campus, and will kick off at 10:00 a.m. with the women’s 6k, followed by the men’s 5.2 mile at 10:45 a.m.
Friday’s meet is Penn State’s only home meet of the season and will act as the team’s senior night.
In the Huskies’ only meet of the 2024 season thus far, the team placed second behind only the host team at the Marist Invitational back on Aug. 31st. The team ran an average time of 18:43 and had three runners finish inside the top ten: Loghan Hughes (18:19), Maddie Relyea (18:21) and Claire Paci (18:29). All three runners will look to build on strong opening performances, including Paci, who is the only freshman on the team.
The Huskies placed second at Marist while running just six runners, five of whom were freshmen or sophomores, signifying the talent of a loaded sophomore class, which accounts for 41 percent of the roster (7/18).
Eight of the top-ten finishers from last season’s Spiked Shoe Invitational return for 2024, including four Penn State runners (all of whom finished in last season’s top five), making this one of the more bottlenecked meets on the Huskies’ schedule. Last season’s winner, Faith DeMars of Penn State, returns, running just 30 seconds shy of the all-time meet record. This will be the Huskies’ final meet until Oct. 5, when the team travels to Lehigh for the Paul Short Invitational. With a near three-week hiatus following Friday’s meet at State College, expect the Huskies to show a workmanlike effort as multiple runners are in position to land inside the top ten, including the aforementioned Hughes and Relyea. Paci will look to become the highest placing freshman since 2022, when Syracuse’s Sage Brooks finished second with a time of 21:09. The doors have opened for UConn runners to jump in rankings, as Hughes and sophomore Jackie Izzo both ran personal best times at the Huskies’ last meet.
The last Connecticut runner to win the Spiked Shoe Invitational was Jillian Sullivan in 2006, running a time of 21:16. The all-time record at the Spiked Shoe Invitational is 20:21, set by the University of Michigan’s Shannon Osika in 2014.