Sept. 7, 2011

Contact: Greg Murphy

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The Cleveland State cross country team will head to Detroit on Saturday (Sept. 10) for its second meet of the season where they will compete in the 25th annual Detroit Titan Invitational.

The race will start at 11:15 a.m. at Detroit's Cass-Benton Park, where the team has never ran.

CSU is coming off of a solid team performance last week at the Flyer 5K Invitational where they finished fourth among six Division I teams competing.

"It was extremely hot on Saturday and not ideal conditions for racing, but I was happy with the way the team competed," head coach Joe Jaketic said. "Everyone ran hard and battled the entire race and I'm excited to see what kind of progress we can make this week."

The Viking freshmen showed serious promise on Saturday, as three of the team's top-five finishers were running their first college race.

Freshman Kendra Kezur led the Vikings with a time of 20:33, finishing 21st amongst Division 1 runners.

"Kendra ran hard," Jaketic said. "I was really happy with what I saw out of Kendra and thought she made a nice transition from practice to the first race."

Three of Kezur's teammates were close behind her, finishing in a pack in 24th, 25th and 26th place in the Division I field. Senior Kelly Zaleski was CSU's second finisher in 20:44, while Katie Webb recorded a time of 20:50 and Allison Craine a time of 20:53.

"We preached throughout the entire preseason about running in packs and helping each other out," Jaketic said. "I thought we were able to do that at Dayton on Saturday and fed off our teammates."

Rounding out the scoring for CSU was freshman Tori Holt, finishing 35th with a 21:35 time.

The Vikings other seven finishers all finished better than 67th overall, with four of them coming within just over a minute of each other.

The team will stay in state next week, as they will head to Cedarville to compete in the Friendship Invitational on Saturday (Sept. 17).