Women's Cross Country | 11/8/2025 9:51:00 PM

SAC Cross Country All-Conference Honorees | SAC Championships Results

SILOAM SPRINGS, Ark. — The Oklahoma Panhandle State women's cross country team took fifth place out of nine teams and had two runners earn All-SAC honors at the Sooner Athletic Conference Championships on Saturday hosted by John Brown.
 
The fifth-place showing is the highest at the conference meet for the Aggies under head coach Cyrus Hall, and Carolina Valenzuela and Shania Chavez became the first two Panhandle State cross country runners to earn all-conference in Hall's tenure.
 
Borrowing two runners from its track squad, OPSU's five-person score came out to 125, which bested Wayland Baptist by 14 and beat Mid-America Christian, Texas Wesleyan and Science & Arts by well over 50 apiece. The Aggies were within striking distance of runner-up College of the Ozarks, John Brown and Nelson, who finished with scores between 91 and 101. No. 24 Oklahoma City had five finishers in the top eight to run away with the team title.
 
Valenzuela crossed in 23:50.89 to take 11th place overall, with Chavez just behind in 12th with a time of 24:29.67. Based on OCU's results, Valenzuela and Chavez finished only one and two spots out qualifying for NAIA Nationals, respectively. The top 15 runners in the SAC are named All-Conference.
 
Lillyan Gerow placed 22nd, completing the 6k JBU Cross Country Course in 25:53.19.
 
Track runners Ki'Anna Jones and Breyanna Kemp took 34th and 52nd, respectively, out of 62 finishers. Jones' time was 27:39.10, and Kemp's was 32:00.17.
 
Coach Cyrus Hall's Thoughts …

"I'm really proud of them. They ran awesome today. The girls have been through a lot of adversity this year. We started the year with eight girls, and pretty quickly after the first meet we ended up with three, and those three girls just kept working, and I just kept telling them, 'Hey, we can run fast, we'll get it together, we'll figure it out,' and they trusted me and kept running hard and kept getting better and better, and they ran really well today."  
 
Though he praised the achievements of Valenzuela and Chavez for becoming OPSU's first All-SAC cross country runners since 2022, Hall felt as though Gerow came up huge for the Aggies' team placement.
 
"I thought that maybe our MVP today was Lillyan. She ran not necessarily her fastest race today, but her best race when we needed her. She bridged the gap between our two girls at the front … and our two girls at the back just getting through the finish line. So Lillyan came up huge. She was only seven spots out of all-conference. … So she kind of saved our bacon a little bit.
 
"We had a good year this year, we're going to try to keep building our women's team. The goal (moving forward) is to get up into the top three (at the SAC Championships), which I think we can do."