Diana Clock/The Hoya No. 5 Georgetown finished third behind BYU and Colorado this weekend in Terra Haute, Ind.

Led by strong performances from sophomores Nicole Lee and Jodee Adams-Moore, the No. 5 Georgetown women’s cross country team claimed a third place finish last Saturday at the Asics Pre-National Invitational, an event intended as a preview of next month’s national championship.

The Hoyas collected 175 points to finish third behind Brigham Young (55) and Colorado (143) in one of two seeded races held over the weekend. No. 2 Stanford won the other seeded race by a 105-point margin over second-place finisher Wake Forest.

Entering as strong favorites in their section, top-ranked Brigham Young lived up to expectations by effectively controlling the race and placing all five of its scorers within the top 15. The team later demonstrated its depth by claiming four of the top five individual finishes in an open race held for teams that brought more athletes than were able to participate in the seeded competitions.

“BYU has no weaknesses,” Georgetown’s Director of Cross Country and Track and Field Ron Helmer said. “They’ve got frontrunners, they’ve got depth, and they have the experience of having won the meet. They have everything covered.”

Where Brigham Young leaves off, however, Georgetown and a handful of other teams stand, evenly matched, waiting to battle next month for a trophy at nationals.

“We’ve got better depth than anybody out there except for BYU,” Helmer said. “What we’re lacking right now is front-running, and what we have is three or four or five people that within three or four weeks have the ability to be frontrunners, and be in the top 20 at the national championships. If we get that, we’re going to be pretty good in the end.”

While Georgetown trailed Colorado last Saturday, and based on aggregate times would have also finished third in the other seeded race, Helmer said the performance does not necessarily provide an accurate indication of Georgetown’s ability. Three likely scorers for Georgetown at the national meet didn’t contribute to the team scoring on Saturday, and those who did run were in the middle of intense training and entered the meet without rest. Senior Jill Laurendeau participated in the meet but ran extremely conservatively, junior Amanda Pape competed in the open division rather than the seeded race for precautionary reasons and senior All-American Marni Kruppa missed the meet entirely to continue preparation for the Big East Championship.

“If you look at the [combined results], with running the five people that we did, in the mediocre fashion that we ran, with Jill at No. 6 and Marni not in the race, that still makes us good enough to be the fifth best team in the country, and you can’t call that bad,” Helmer said. “The way we set it up, intending to be conservative, and intending to come out of the weekend with the ability to recover quickly and start preparing for the Big East, if you look at everything, given all of that, I’d call it an OK performance.”

In the absence of an upperclassman frontrunner, the sophomores were the main highlight for the team, as Lee and Adams-Moore paced the group with 22nd and 26th place finishes. Lee recorded a time of 21 minutes, 6 seconds, to lead Georgetown’s scorers, and Adams-Moore followed closely behind in 21:11.

“I thought those two did a really good job,” Helmer said. “We were a little tired, a little dead-legged, and everybody hurt, but they dealt with it better than most of the other people.”

Another bright spot was the performances of senior Erin Sicher and junior Treniere Clement who, after struggling at the Great American Cross Country Festival last month, rebounded nicely to earn 37th and 40th place finishes, respectively.

“I was on both of them pretty hard [after the Great American],” Helmer said. “Last time out, neither of them did a good job at all, and they heard about it, and I’m really proud of the way they absorbed the criticism and guidance. If they keep a positive attitude and keep that effort going, it’s only the beginning of what can be a really nice stretch of races here over the last five weeks of the season.”

With the Big East Championship on Nov. 1 and nationals following three weeks later, the team hopes to learn from the experience over the weekend as they begin a critical period of training and preparation for the postseason.

“I know that we didn’t run at the level that our talent and our preparation indicates that we can,” Helmer said. “There are circumstances that played into it, and we have work to do. If we’re able to do it, and get to that level, then I think we’ll be one of the top two or three teams in the country come the end of November.”