Salisbury, N.C. – North Greenville Women's Cross Country finished 2^nd overall at the Fleet Feet Invite on Saturday with an average time of 21:23. It is the best team finish for the Crusaders since the 2018 season. 
 
North Greenville top-five finishers all placed in the top-20 of Saturday's race (six runners overall) including freshman Riley Shope who was NGU's top finisher. In her first race Shope finished 9^th overall with a time of 20:28. Riley Nicholson finished second for North Greenville and 12^th overall with a 20:49. She shaved a minute off of her 2022 time in the same race. 
 
Another freshman making a strong first appearance for the Crusaders is Cecily Anderton who ran the race in 21:20, finishing 13^th overall. Paris Alsup finished 17^th with a time of 21:56 followed by Kylie Futrell kicked off her senior campaign with a 19^th place finish and a time of 22:15. Zoie Justice was the 20^th place finisher with a time of 22:42. 
 
Emma Bright was 22^nd with a time of 22:57 while Kaylee Copeland finished 33^rd with a 24:46. Kacey Miller finished 37^th with a 27:15. 
 
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 heads to Spartanburg for the Converse Kickoff on September 16^th.