Jenny Barringer can finally say she owns the Big 12 Conference.
Barringer won the individual crown at the 2009 Big 12 Cross Country Championship on Saturday as she finished the 6-kilometer race in 20 minutes and 27 seconds, 46 seconds better than runner-up and fellow teammate Allie McLaughlin.
“This took me five years,” Barringer said in a news release. “It took me three years of college to get to the Olympics (3,000-meter steeplechase) and five years of cross country to get to the Big 12 Championship. It means a lot and it means a lot that I came back with a really strong team. This is absolutely the most fun race I’ve had in college so far. It was a really fun day.”
Barringer, a senior, had been the runner-up in 2005, 2006 and 2007 before redshirting in 2008.
Speaking of runners-up, the Colorado Buffaloes women’s and men’s cross country teams both finished second in the tournament.
On the women’s side, Barringer and McLaughlin didn’t receive enough support as the No. 3 Buffs scored 52 points, 14 more than the 2009 conference champion, No. 14 Texas Tech.
“We knew that the Texas Tech women’s team was vastly underrated,” head coach Mark Wetmore said in a news release. “They had not raced in any of the big venues. They ran an excellent race today and we were not going to beat them today.”
The No. 4 men’s team, meanwhile, ran into a buzzsaw as Oklahoma State’s individual runners went in the top four spots. CU scored 56 points to OSU’s 24.
“There isn’t any way for me to review the race plan and pretend that we could have won today,” Wetmore said in a news release. “Oklahoma State is an excellent team and nearly shut us out. We can run better than we did but we weren’t beating OSU on this course today.”
CU’s next meet is the NCAA Mountain Regionals on Nov. 14 at 11 a.m. in Albuquerque, N.M.
Contact CU Independent Sports Editor Cheng Sio at Cheng.sio@colorado.edu.
