Four Net All-GLVC Honors As USI Men Finish 3rd At GLVC Meet
ROMEOVILLE, Ill.—Four University of Southern Indiana Men’s Cross Country runners collected All-Conference honors as the No. 12 Screaming Eagles finished third at the Great Lakes Valley Conference Championships Saturday morning.
Junior Noah Hufnagel (Santa Claus, Indiana), who held the lead throughout the first half of the race, finished second in the 164-competitor field with an eight-kilometer time of 23 minutes, 56.40 seconds to lead the Eagles. Defending champion Blake Jones of the University of Illinois Springfield won the race with a time of 23:49.70.
Fellow classmate Titus Winders (Mansfield, Tennessee), the 2019 GLVC champion and two-time defending NCAA II Midwest region champion, finished sixth with a time of 24:14.20 to join Hufnagel on the All-GLVC team. Sophomores Braden Nicholson (Claremont, Illinois) and Mitchell Hopf (Santa Claus, Indiana) were 12th and 13th, respectively, to earn All-GLVC honors.
Freshman Silas Winders (Mansfield, Tennessee) missed out on All-GLVC honors by less than 3.5 seconds as he was 21st to round out the Eagles’ top five performers. Junior Cameron Cox (Huntsville, Alabama) and freshman Dylan Bland (Holland, Indiana) were 33rd and 34th, respectively.
As a team, the Eagles finished with 54 points, one behind second-place Illinois Springfield. Defending GLVC champion and host Lewis University finished first with 42 points in what was essentially a three-team competition for the conference title. Drury University finished fourth with 153 points, while the University of Indianapolis was fifth with 184 points.
The third-place finish marks the lowest placement for the Eagles at the GLVC Championships since they were third at the 2002 conference meet. Illinois Springfield also became just the second team to finish higher than USI at the league meet in the last 19 years as Lewis has been the only other men’s team to win a GLVC title since the 2003 season. USI’s run of 15 straight GLVC titles ended with a second-place finish at the 2020 GLVC Championships.
USI returns to action when it hosts the NCAA II Midwest Region Championships at Angel Mounds November 6 at 11:45 a.m.
