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Alfano victorious at Lee Calhoun Invitational

Freshman Nicole Alfano draws closer to the finish line at the Bradley Classic in October. Alfano won the 5,000 meters in Macomb last weekend. Photo by Garth Shanklin.
Freshman Nicole Alfano draws closer to the finish line at the Bradley Classic in October. Alfano won the 5,000 meters in Macomb last weekend. Photo by Garth Shanklin.

Most of Bradley’s track and field team got the weekend off, but the runners that raced this past weekend brought home a title.

Freshman Nicole Alfano won the individual title in the women’s 5,000 meter race at the Lee Calhoun Invitational in Macomb last weekend, beating Western Illinois sophomore Madison Lefler by six seconds.

Head coach Willy Wood said he was thrilled with how Alfano performed in the race, especially given her relative lack of experience at that distance.

“We were really excited for her,” Wood said. “She had been wanting to move up to the 5,000 meters. She’s just a freshman, and I believe it’s the first one she’s ever done on the track. We just told her to compete; we knew she’d be able to do well within herself in terms of the level of competition there. She competed remarkably well, and we were all really excited for her to get the win.”

Senior Hannah Booker finished eighth in the 800 meters, which was hundredths of a second behind teammate Kathryn Adelman, who finished seventh.

The runners that Bradley sent to the meet were sent for a specific reason, according to Wood.

“We had raced a few weeks in a row and it was more of an opportunity for people who have yet to race at all this year or people who are on a slightly different schedule because they’re coming back from injury or their training is just a lower mileage or something like that,” Wood said. “We just used it to give them an opportunity to compete.”

Bradley’s full team will be in action this weekend at the Illinois Twilight in Champaign tomorrow night. Wood said these meets will signal that the team will prepare for the rest of its season, which includes the Missouri Vally Conference Championships.

“That’s really a transition into the next part of the season,” Wood said. “We have the Illinois Twilight meet, then the Drake Relays, then Stanford. After a week off, it’s the conference meet, and this is going to be the first real week where we take a real good shot at people running really fast with people running their primary events and we see what we can do.”

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