Hornets Defend House, Take SEC Red Jamboree

Nearly every meet, one can look at the results and find new and interesting way to demonstrate the dominance of the Saline girls’ cross country team.

Take Tuesday’s SEC Red Jamboree. The Hornets, led by Elianna Shwayder, went 1-2-3 in the race and placed four girls in the top five. More amazingly, if you took Saline’s top four girls out of the race, the team still would have won.

Saline finished with 19 points, just four points more than the best possible score, and 47 points better than Bedford (66). Also running were Huron (85) Skyline (89), Monroe (126) and Pioneer (161).

Leading the way was Shwayder, a sophomore. She finished the race in 19:55.47.

“I think my time was good for this course, which is notorious for being very, very slow,” Shwayder said. “It’s an intimidating course. But this is our house and we defend it.”

She said she spent the first mile running with the top group.
“I let them set the pace for the first mile. My strong suit is running hills. When I got to the hills, I wanted to put space between me and everyone else,” Shwayder said.

She did that, building and then maintaining a five second lead on Saline junior Alyssa Cummings (2^nd, 20:00.12). Senior Amy Creutz (3^rd, 20:19;67),  freshman Abby Rentschler (5^th, 20:28.97) and sophomore Gloria Park (8^th, 20:55.05) completed Saline’s scoring.  Lauren Green (9^th, 20:58.42), Amy Frauhammer (14^th, 21:10.56) and Lindsay Walter (15^th, 21:32.20) placed in the top 15.

With two SEC Red Jamboree victories, the Hornets appear to be locks to win a 16^th straight league championship. Looked at another way, there are girls on the Saline team who weren’t even born yet the last time a team other than the Hornets won the SEC.

But the Hornets have loftier goals.

“Our goal is to win the state meet. We won the Spartan a couple weeks ago and everyone is running really well. It is definitely within our grasp,” Shwayder said. “We’re running for our seniors and our coach and we really want to reach our goal.”