Cross country teams place Top 20 at Bradley

The Southeast Missouri State Redhawks men's and women's cross country teams placed in top the Top 20 at the Bradley Pink Classic over the weekend and now have their sights set on the Ohio Valley Conference Championships.

"The season is going pretty much how we predicted it so far, so far we've had a better race every single week, and we go and race tomorrow at Bradley we expect to do better again," Southeast coach Ryan Lane said before his teams competed at Bradley.

The women's team placed 10th and the men placed 18th at Bradley. The Redhawks women's team finished as the top OVC team at the meet ahead of conference foes Morehead State, Murray State and Eastern Illinois. Rebekah Lawson was the top finisher for the women in 14th place in the 6k race with a time of 21 minutes, 37.9 seconds.

For the men, Tyler Beaman was the top Redhawks' finisher for the second time this season. He crossed the line in 66th place in the men's red race in a time of 25:53.5.

The OVC preseason polls had the Redhawks women's team finishing fourth and the men's team fifth, however Lane expects both the men and women to place third or better.

"I'm a big believer in, there are no magic beans, there is no special thing that is going to make anybody better, it's a cumulative effort," Lane said. "We start our work in June and we work to this point and everything we've done so far is the purposeful, scheduled, pragmatic movement towards this part of the season right now."

On the women's side, the Redhawks have a relatively unknown star in sophomore Angela Sumner from Wildwood, Missouri, who missed last spring with mononucleosis.

"Most people don't know she exists," Lane said. "She has made us a lot better. She is an aggressive runner, and she makes the rest of my girls aggressive and she really sets the tone for us when it comes to racing."

Sumner's best finish was when she placed fifth at the Saluki Invitational with a time of 18:28.76 seconds. She finished seventh with a time of 15:60 in the 4k at the Gabby Reuveni Early Bird held at Washington University in St. Louis.

"It's been going good, I've been getting stronger, and I've been feeling really good about the season," Sumner said. "My expectation was to stay healthy and be on [the] Top 5 scores, and so far it's been doing that and just doing better and getting PRs [personal records]. We have a really good team, our girls are really close. So we try to just push each other to do better. They help me get better, and I help them get better."

The men are led by sophomore Marc Maton from Chatham, Illinois, who Lane said sets the tone for the men. Maton said that the season has been up and down for him personally, but that the team across the board has had good performances.

Maton's high point of the season came at the Louisville Classic where he said the team did exactly what the coach asked him to do. He believes that Louisville was a benchmark for what the Redhawks can do as a team but said that they can do better.

"Marc has really started to come into his own," Lane said. "He's more of a mid-distance runner. He put in a lot of work, and he's shown he's ready to be our top dog and lead us at the conference meet, and he's going to set the tone. Whatever Marc does, we're going to do come conference."

Maton finished in 86th place at Bradley in the men's race with a time of 26:05.6, the second fastest finish for the men.

The Redhawks got quite the preview at the Bradley meet of their conference opponents as well as some of the best competition in the nation.

Bradley will be the site of the regional tournament and had more than 300 participants in each race. The ladies' finish as the top OVC team should be a strong indicator of how they will compete in November. The men finished fourth among OVC teams at Bradley with Morehead State, SIU Edwardsville and Eastern Illinois finishing in front of them.

"It's really close this year," Sumner said of the conference competition. "We want to get top three for sure as a team, and as an individual I want to be all-conference and definitely PR."

Maton has high expectations for the men's team as well.

"My personal expectations, I'd like to run under 25 minutes at the minimum," Maton said. "I would like our team to place at least third ... and second if we have a great day."

The OVC Championship will be held on Nov.1 in Oxford, Alabama.