Salisbury, N.C. – Men's Cross Country opened the 2023 season with a third place finish at the Fleet Feet Invite on Saturday Morning with an average of 28:29. 
 
Mason White led North Greenville to the third place finish with the team's best individual time. He finished 12^thoverall with a time of 27:40 in his first race with North Greenville. Close behind White was Hayden Good who finished 19^th overall with a time of 28:10. 
 
Thomas Schilling and Cohen McDonald had solid debuts for the Crusaders in their first collegiate race. Schilling finished 26^th in 28:38 while McDonald finished 30^th and crossed in 28:54. Both scored for NGU as top-five finishers. 
 
Ryland Kowalski shaved 57 – seconds off his 2022 time in the same race with a time of 28:59 while finishing 32^nd. Matthew Heath also improved by more than 50 – seconds with a time of 29:02 for a 33^rd place finish. Chas Brewer finished 37^th with a tiem of 29:11 while Solomon Canup finished with a time of 29:43 finishing 42^nd. Freshman David Kushnir finished with a time of 33:02. Nick Lavelle clocked in at 30:42. 
 
From Coach Stober 
 
"I challenged the team to not have any expectations going into this race. You never know what you're going to get with the first race of the season. Our team has trained really hard all summer long, and it's been at least three months since most of them have competed in a race setting. We knew going into this race that the course isn't very fast, so our focus was to execute our race plan for the first part of the race, compete the latter part of the race, and have fun while doing it. 
 
On the men's side I was impressed with how Mason ran. He and Hayden executed the first two miles just as we had discussed, and Mason was able to work his way up the last three miles ultimately running a pretty decent time considering the difficulty of this course. I also thought all of our freshmen ran really well for their first collegiate 8K. They looked poised and we ended up having two freshmen (Thomas and Cohen) run top 5 for us. Ryland and Matthew both ran good races and each of them ran almost a minute faster than they did last year at this meet. 
 
For the women, freshman Riley Shope had a phenomenal collegiate debut. Not only was she our top runner, but she finished 9^th overall. Riley Nicholson had a great season opener running #2 for us, and running over a minute faster than she did last year at this meet. Another freshman, Cecily Anderton, had a great collegiate debut running #3 for us and finishing in the top 15. Paris and Kylie rounded out our top 5, both having solid season openers as well. We ended up having six girls in the top 20 which ultimately led to our women's team finishing 2^nd in the team scoring. 
 
I'm really proud of this team. They have trained hard all summer, and they've already faced a lot of adversity for it to be this early in the season. But they keep showing up, putting in the work, and have a positive attitude. This is a special group and I'm excited to see what they do throughout the rest of the season."
 
Next Up 
North Greenville runs in the Converse Kickoff on September 16^th.