The Hopkinsville girls cross country team brought home its first top-10 finish at state in 12 years on Saturday.
The Lady Tigers put two runners in the top 50 and just 3:42 separated the first through fifth runners. A cross country team’s score comes from adding the place of the top five runners and adjusting it to remove the places of runners from teams that did not field a full team.
Lauren Mayes ran a 21:06 to finish in 18th place – Hoptown’s first top 10 at the state meet since Aunye Christian finished in the top 10 in 2010 and 2011.
Alexis Herrera-Loveto continued her trend of finishing strong in races with a 46th-place finish in a personal best time of 22:20 over the 3.1-mile course at the Kentucky Horse Park. She ran a 7:34 second mile and finished her race by running a 7:57 over the final 1.1 miles.
Kaydon Coats finished in 91st place with a time of 23:47, and Evelyn Bangart was 103rd in 24:14. Bangart ran a personal best time two weeks ago and has knocked nearly five minutes off her time since the first of the year.
Running in her final cross country race, senior Rebecca Wood finished in 124th place in 24:48. The lone senior on the team was running in her fourth straight state meet,
Seventh grader Ameriah Acree, running in just her fourth varsity race, came in 185th place in 28:19. Luanna Acree finished in 199th place in 29:12.
As a team, Hopkinsville finished in ninth place with 309 points, seven points ahead of 10th place Elizabethtown, and 18 points ahead of 11th place Warren East.
It was Hopkinsville’s best finish at state since a seventh-place finish in 2012.
