It didn’t take long for coach Paul Spangler to chalk up his first victory at Florida as both the men’s and women’s cross country teams dominated to start the 2012 season.
For the second straight year, the Gators took the top spot at the Western Carolina Invitational without much of a fight from the six other competitors.
Florida’s men captured five of the top ten spots, including the first three in the season’s only 5k race.
Redshirt senior Josh Izewski won his first race in almost two years with a collegiate best time of 15:14.10. Jimmy Clark, last season’s Southeastern Freshman of the Year, and junior Mark Parrish followed suit, respectively.
Spangler was also impressed with John-Logan Hines, who didn’t crack the top five for the Gators until the final race of the 2011 season but finished eighth overall and fourth on the team Friday.
“On the men’s side, our top five scorers did a great job,” Spangler said. “We averaged about 30 seconds faster per guy than last year. The biggest improvement in our lineup was the fourth scorer, which really closed the gap in the pack for us. It was also good to see our veteran fifth-year senior Josh get the win tonight and start off his final season with a victory.”
The Gators saw similar success in the women’s only two-mile run of the year, even without their top three runners.
In the absence of Cory McGee, Mandy Perkins and Florence Ngetich, freshman Julie Macedo stepped up and took the overall top spot in the race with a time of 11:14.40.
And not to be outdone by the men’s team, the women placed one through four and their fifth runner finished seventh overall to blow UNC-Asheville, the next closest team, out of the water by 42 points.
“Overall, we saw a very solid effort on both the men’s and women’s sides this evening, especially within the top five,” Spangler said. “As a whole, both teams ran quite a bit faster this year than last year at this meet. We certainly still have work to do as the season gets going. We had a very productive track season and our athletes did a great job of training over the summer. We want to see them get better year after year and we certainly saw a big jump from this point last year to this year. With that said, we’ll keep working as the season progresses.”
