In a large race, it takes a lot for a team to get noticed. The elite will be the teams standing in the spotlight. The Binghamton University women’s cross country team garnered some of that attention this weekend placing fifth out of the 29 teams competing in the Albany Invitational.

Head coach Annette Acuff was more than satisfied with the effort and did not hesitate classifying this as one of the team’s best.

‘I was very pleased with how they ran,’ Acuff said. ‘Especially seeing that our top five runners were freshmen. This is by far the best team performance ever by our team. A couple of girls have moved up considerably since the beginning of the season.’

Freshman Ashley Horton finished first for the Bearcats for the third time in three tries. She placed 10th out of 239 runners with a finishing time of 17:55, which was about 33 seconds behind the winning time 17:21 of Christina DeRosa of UMass.

A top-10 finish in a race as large as this field was is impressive regardless of how many years someone’s been running.

‘To see Ashley finish top-10 in this race with the runners that it had was great,’ Acuff said. ‘She outdid her performance from Lehigh so it’s nice to see her steadily improving,’ she said.

Freshmen Sarah Veith and Shannon Finnegan followed up their teammate Horton finishing in 31st and 40th respectively. Veith ran the 5,000 meter course in 18:38 while Finnegan crossed the line with a time of 18:47.

Rounding out the scoring for the freshmen five were Renee Blair and Alicia Finger, who crossed the line in 45th and 46th respectively finishing within three-tenths of a second of each other.

The men’s team was absent of most of its top runners as Binghamton ran its seventh to eleventh position runners. John Carroll led the men’s team to a 19th place finish out of 26 teams. The sophomore out of Ithaca, N.Y. was the first BU player to finish as he placed 76th in a field of 228 with a time of 27:05. Freshman teammate Jeff Minucci was second for the Bearcats, finishing in 110th.

On her decision to rest her top runners coach Acuff was clear that the decision rested on the team’s future races.

‘Out team’s pretty young and our guys have to run three long and tough races in a span of four weeks,’ she said. ‘We want the team to be focused on the championship races.’

The men’s top runner in five races last year, Chris Gaube, will have a redshirt season along with teammate Adam Hill, said Acuff.

‘It’s too bad we won’t have these guys competing this fall. But this will help the program because we’ll have these two guys down the road,’ Acuff said.

Powerhouse Harvard captured both the men’s and women’s races. They dominated the men’s race winning by more than 100 points; Harvard scored 38 to second place RIT’s 140 points. In the women’s race Harvard and Brown had a competitive race with Harvard edging out Brown by nine points.

Considering the tough competition, Acuff was pleased with Binghamton’s high finish.

‘Harvard and Brown are very competitive schools; they are both top-15 schools, along with Colgate. We were very pleased with the team’s performance,’ she said.

Binghamton is back on the road and will be competing at the America East Championship, which takes place at Stony Brook this year, on Oct. 27.

‘We are certainly expecting to finish in the top five of conference and hopefully one of our teams will finish in the top three if not both,’ Acuff said.