The Clovis Crush women’s cross country team captured the Central Valley Conference championships at Woodward Park on Wednesday.
Clovis Community edged out Fresno City College with 23 points and a total time 1:43.08 in the 3.1 mile race and an average time of 20:37.
“I thought the race went well,” coach Clayton Alberston said. “Some people ran better than I thought they were going to. We’ve been training really well and I thought some of our girls were going to make an improvement.”
The Crush dominated the standings with 14 runners finishing in the top 23 overall, including freshmen Alyssa Freeman, Toni Payton and sophomore Alyssa Canales. They finished second, third and fourth, respectively.
“Our front three girls ran really well, Albertson said. “They were ahead of Fresno City’s second girl [freshman Olivia Zambrano] and she has been running pretty well. Overall, we won pretty convincingly, and that was our goal.”
Freeman timed out at 19:46 overall, with an average of 6:22 per mile to lead the Crush. Payton ran 19:58.9, an average of 6:26.8 per mile and Canales ran 20:18.4 and an average of 6:33.1 per mile.
Also finishing in the top 10 were sophomores Natalie Curtis and Lily Kahn.
The men’s team had a strong showing as well, finishing second overall as a team behind first place College of the Sequoias.
Sophomore Mohamed Saleh finished second overall individually in the four-mile race with a time of 21:25.1 and teammate Chris Watkins finished fifth at 21:41.0.
“Our guys have been training really well,” Albertson said. “The College of the Sequoias has been beating us all year and it really hasn’t been close. But the way our guys have been training… it ended up being a fairly close race.
Up next for the Crush are the Northern Regional Championships on Nov. 1 at Toro Park in Salinas, followed by the CCCAA state championships Nov. 23 at Woodward Park.