Rebecca Bronstein finished third and USD's next four women all crossed inside the top 21, carrying the Toreros to second place among 24 teams Saturday at the Louisville XC Classic. The women's group scored 64 points in the 6K, while the USD men placed 11th of 23 teams with 269 points in the 8K.
Bronstein completed the women's race in 22 minutes, 35.2 seconds. Clare Boneau followed in 10th at 23:02.1, and Camryn Kozak arrived 1.4 seconds later in 11th. That back-to-back finish created the center of the score, preventing other teams from placing runners between USD's second and third athletes.
Freshmen Evelyn Cody and Madison Li closed the five-runner scoring group. Cody took 19th in 23:22.6; Li was 21st in 23:29.2. Jillian Lange finished 29th in 23:40.6, and Abigail Huth placed 31st in 23:43.3. All seven women completed the race within 68.1 seconds of Bronstein.
Cross-country team scoring counts the first five finishers, making the gap behind a leader as consequential as the leader's place. USD combined one podium result with four more runners in the top 21. The sixth and seventh athletes do not add to the basic score unless needed for displacement or tiebreak procedures, but their proximity showed depth behind the counted five.
Parker McAdam led the men in 28th place with a time of 25:59.8. Jack Loomis followed in 44th at 26:20.6. Max Gibbons and Joseph Bronzini finished 60th and 61st, three seconds apart, before Troy Turner completed the scoring five in 81st at 26:51.4.
Robert Johnson placed 100th in 27:11.3, and Samuel Keith was 133rd in 27:46.4. The men's spread was larger than the women's and the team position reflected it. USD still placed in the upper half of the 23-team field, with three freshmen among the seven listed finishers.
The school recap describes major improvement from the previous invitational but does not supply comparable prior-course times in the same account. Course length, terrain and field strength complicate direct time comparisons across meets. Saturday's supported measures are the Louisville places, points and internal gaps: second and 64 for the women, 11th and 269 for the men.
The women's middle group was especially compact. Boneau and Kozak were separated by 1.4 seconds, while Cody and Li finished 6.6 seconds apart. That pairing pattern reduces the places an opponent can insert between teammates. On the men's side, Gibbons and Bronzini achieved the same effect in 60th and 61st, but the larger gaps before and after them raised the cumulative score. Louisville supplied 24 women's teams and 23 men's teams, making every place gained inside those packs part of the scoring margin. The crowded field made compression especially valuable.
USD returns to California for the Highlander Classic at UC Riverside on Oct. 17. The women's result gives the team a repeatable scoring shape rather than a single breakout: Bronstein at the front, Boneau and Kozak together, then two freshmen inside the top 21. The men's next task is to compress the distance from McAdam to the fifth scorer.