Colorado College's Singer, Dallas' Wilgenbusch Earn All-America Honors at Championship Meet

Photo by: Charlie Lengal
Photo by: Charlie Lengal

(Story contains contributions from the athletics websites at Colorado College, University of Dallas and Trinity University)

LOUISVILLE, Ky.
-- Colorado College's Elliot Singer and University of Dallas' Anna Wilgenbusch capped their 2021 season with all-America performances Saturday morning at the NCAA Women's Cross Country National Championship meet at E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kentucky. Results

The efforts of the duo on Saturday mark the 16th and 17th time in league history a woman has raced to all-America status at the national championship meet.

Singer, a freshman from San Francisco, Calif., achieved all-America status by placing 29th with a personal-best 6K time of 21:39.2, the fourth-fastest time in CC program history. She was the third-fastest freshman in the meet and the first all-America from CC since Leah Wessler and Katie Sandfort both earned the honor in 2016.

The CC women competed in this year's championship as a team - the first conference team to qualify for the national championship meet since the Trinity women finished 16th at the 2017 Championships - and finished in 27th place with 617 points. Johns Hopkins won the team title with 130 points, followed by Claremont-Mudd-Scripps with 132. It was the first national appearance for the Tigers as a team since 2016.

"The team stepped up and performed extremely well on the national stage," Colorado College head coach Alex Nichols said. "Elliot delivered a huge performance to cap off an incredible season. We're really happy to have out-performed our national ranking and will use this as a valuable learning experience for the coming years. This is a young team that has a very bright future ahead."

Juniors Claire Quinn and Kendall Accetta finished 155th and 182nd, respectively, in their first appearance at the national meet. Quinn finished the race in 22:48.7 while Accetta ran a 22:57.7. Senior Megan Koch placed 224th in her final collegiate race with a time of 23:20.2, while freshman Sydney Rankin closed out the scoring for CC in 228th place with a time of 23:21.9. Juniors Lily Brazil and Dafna Williams finished 277th and 289th, respectively.

Dallas' Wilgenbusch, a senior from St. Paul, Minn., finished in 34th with a final time of 21:46.0, demolishing her previous best of 22:10.9 set at the 2019 National Championships when she also earned all-America honors and became UD's first all-American in any sport.

"She's one one of the most coachable athletes out there," said UD head coach Nick Schneigert. "She nailed all of her assigned times with a few surges here and there.  She's faced some obstacles over the last few years, but she was able to go out there with no distractions and did a fantastic job."

The performances by Singer and Wilgenbusch marked the first time since the aforementioned 2016 championships that the SCAC had two student-athletes achieve all-America status at the same women's cross country national championship and just the fifth time in league history.

Trinity's Abby Blackwood, a senior from Malibu, Calif., qualified for the championships as an individual and recorded a time of 22:37.5 en route to a 128th-place finish in her first career appearance. Her finish on Saturday came as the third-best performance among SCAC competitors, 13th amongst all West Region entries.

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