PEORIA, Ill. ?  The Indiana State women's cross country team was one of 15 teams to compete at the Bradley Classic at Newman Golf Course on Friday evening.  The Sycamores competed well as a cohesive unit and ran to a third place finish in the team's first 6,000 meter race of the season.

The Sycamores recorded a team score of 127 to finish in third place overall.  Iowa State won the race with a team score of 51, while Missouri Valley Conference foe Northern Iowa finished in second place with a score of 94.  Drake finished in fourth place with a team score of 139 while St. Louis finished with a score of 175 to round out the top five teams.  DePaul (175), Wisconsin Milwaukee (191), Illinois (204), Illinois State (211), Western Illinois (234), Butler (240), Bradley (254), Illinois-Chicago (318), Northern Illinois (344) and Wisconsin-Green Bay (362) rounded out the rest of the field.

“We had a solid performance as a team today,” said head coach John Gartland.  “Our goal heading into this to improve from our previous meets and to prepare for the Missouri Valley Conference meet in two weeks and I think we did that well.  Iowa State was a very strong team and proved that today, but I was also proud of the way we raced with Northern Iowa who finished third in the conference last year.  Overall, I thought we made some real progress today.”

Senior Heather Stembridge continued to lead the way for ISU, as she ran a personal-best time of 21:34 to finish in third place overall behind Caedryn Schrunk of Northern Iowa (21:24) and Nicole Braunsdorf of Drake (21:26).  She was followed by junior Kayla Alexander, who finished with a time of 22:10 to finish in 15^th place overall.  Freshman Kacie Klem also had a performance in her first collegiate 6K race, as she placed 18^th with a time of 22:21.  Sophomore Allison Malone ran a personal-best time of 22:57 to finish in 45^th place and junior Emily Pugh ran a time of 23:01 to place 50^th overall to round out the scoring for the Sycamores.

“The team was very strong from one to five today,” said Gartland.  “Heather ran one of the better races of her career today and fought hard to stay with that lead pack all race to finish in third place overall.  Kayla actually led the race for about the first mile, then faded a bit and then came back for a strong finish.  I thought Kacie also did a really nice job running at the 6k distance for the first time in her career to finish as our third runner and Allison and Emily rounded out a strong team effort on the day.”