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TSR's 2024 Preseason D3 XC Top 10 Team Rankings (Women): #6 Lynchburg Hornets
- Kevin Fischer
- Sep 8, 2024
- 6 min read
Written by Kevin Fischer, edits & additional commentary via Gavin Struve & Garrett Zatlin
NOTE: Earlier this summer, The Stride Report reached out to nearly every team that was considered for a possible ranking this summer. While we did receive numerous responses and great clarity, we did not get a 100% response rate. On certain occasions, we are referencing TFFRS in order to talk about returners and athletes who are out of eligibility.
It wasn't until a few years ago that the Lynchburg women truly developed into a top-tier cross country program. And with three NCAA XC Championship berths in a row, their women's team have shown that their presence on the national stage is not at all a flash in the pan.
The Hornets are building something special under Coach Jake Reed, and they have a great chance to take another step into uncharted territory this fall. That, of course, is easier said than done.
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Lynchburg opened their 2023 fall campaign by competing well against a mostly Division One field at the Virginia Tech Invitational. It was hard to gauge exactly where they were at that point compared to their Division Three counterparts, but the Paul Short Run was sure to give us more insight.
That trip to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania went rather well for the Hornets, as they finished 3rd in the "Brown" race, comfortably ahead of Division Three contemporaries like Emory, Carnegie Mellon and Middlebury.
At that meet, Allison Dell (8th) emerged as a high-octane low-stick while Molly Silva (13th) and Sarah James (15th) were shockingly good lead scorers as well. The challenge, however, is that their final two scorers faded back to 56th place and 85th place.
Thankfully, that backend drop-off would be mitigated (although not entirely) at their next meet.
Lynchburg's season took another positive turn a couple of weeks later, as touted Liberty transfer Kayla Werner made her Lynchburg debut at the SUNY Geneseo Mike Woods Invitational and earned a huge 4th place.
Another positive development for the Hornets was the momentum of Courtney Drumm, a transfer from Methodist. In Lynchburg's first two meets, she was a full minute behind the trio of Allison Dell, Molly Silva, and Sarah James. However, at the Mike Woods Invitational, that gap shrunk to just 20 seconds behind Silva.
Between breakouts by Werner and Drumm, Lynchburg went from a team with an excellent top-three to a team with a complete scoring five headlined by an All-American favorite.
The ODAC XC Championships went about as expected, as the Hornets won comfortably over a field that was never expected to be competitive with them.
The South Regional XC Championships, however, proved to be a much more difficult test. It was a two-horse race for the regional crown between Lynchburg and Emory that ended in a tie at 40 points, but Lynchburg won the tie-breaker due to better finishes from their first, fourth and fifth runners.
That tight win didn't necessarily mean anything when both teams advanced to the national meet, but it had to be a confidence-raiser for the Hornets heading into their season finale.
At the cross country national meet, the Hornets put four women in the top-90, and Courtney Drumm followed close behind in 103rd place. Lynchburg was the fifth team to get all five scorers across the line, and had one All-American in Kayla Werner, although she eked out that status with a 40th-place finish.
All of that was good enough for a 7th-place team finish, the best national meet result in program history. And yet, for as impressive as that effort was, we couldn't help but think that this team had yet to reach their full potential.
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Last year’s top four of Kayla Werner, Allison Dell, Sarah James and Molly Silva are all back this year to lead the charge.
Werner, who placed 40th at the 2023 cross country national meet, should improve on that result this year. She looked like a top-20 talent for much of last fall, and now that she has run 16:34 over 5000 meters earlier this year, she clearly has the ability to be a top-half All-American.
We project Dell to join her as an All-American, giving this team the level of multi-tiered firepower that they didn't have even as a top-10 team last fall. On many rosters, she would be the star. Her 13th-place finish over 5000 meters at the indoor national meet suggests that she should also make a jump from her 45th-place finish at the 2023 cross country national meet.
As for James, it’s a little tricky to gauge where she will be fitness-wise after only racing once on the track this year. But after a 2023 cross country campaign where she was consistently solid and ultimately finished 50th at the national meet, we have every reason to think that she will still be a big ingredient in the formula for this team’s success.
Silva, meanwhile, improved from 201st at the 2022 cross country national meet to 93rd in 2023. It will be huge if she can take another step forward in her senior year. While she contested mostly middle distances on the track earlier this year, we feel good about her proven cross country pedigree.
Having a top-four as good as Lynchburg's quartet is fairly rare. It's not often that a team has a group of four runners with a high floor who can still make noticeable scoring impacts with a jump up in their fitness. And if enough of these women do take another leap, then the idea of the Hornets having three All-Americans isn't unrealistic.
Of course, it's the latter-half of this team's varsity lineup that will ultimately determine how far the Hornets go in 2024.
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This year, Lynchburg will have to make do without Courtney Drumm. Her emergence throughout the second-half of the cross country season was huge in getting this team to where they ultimately landed. She continued to make improvements on the track, eventually becoming an outdoor national meet qualifier over 10,000 meters.
Lauren Massey, who was the Hornets' sixth runner at the 2023 cross country national meet, is also gone this fall. Massey broke the 18-minute barrier over 5000 meters this past spring and was a valuable depth piece for a high-level team.
The question is this: Without Drumm, who will emerge as the fifth runner? Kristen Werner and Jordan DiRisio appear to be the two best candidates to fill that role.
Werner did not compete at the cross country national meet last year, but placed 31st at the South Regional XC Championships. She also put down a competitive 5000-meter personal best of 17:44 this spring, suggesting that she had an uptick in her fitness.
DiRisio was Lynchburg’s seventh runner at the 2023 national meet, finishing in 245th place. Her times on the track won’t blow your mind, but her national meet experience and cross country chops give her a great chance to be a contributor this fall. We struggle to believe that the developmental acumen of Coach Jake Reed won't be reflected in her performances over the next few months.
Beyond those two, Hannah Edwards could also be a dark horse to fill one of the backend spots. She was Lynchburg’s ninth finisher at the ODAC XC Championships in 2023 and was very impressive over 800 meters in the spring, running as fast as 2:15.
It’s a bit cloudy whether those improvements can translate to the grass, but if they do, Edwards has the potential to be a valuable piece for the Hornets.
On paper, there is a fairly large gap between Lynchburg's fourth and fifth runners. If somebody takes a step up and narrows that gap, then the Hornets could be a serious podium contender -- and maybe even a favorite.
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With four of their top-five and five out of their top-seven runners coming back this year, there is a ton of optimism that Lynchburg can build upon an already impressive 2023 fall campaign.
Of course, significant uncertainty still remains. We don’t know how sharp James will be after not racing since January, and we don’t know if there’s anybody beyond the top-four who can truly fill Drumm’s now-open scoring role.
Those questions have the potential to be answered pretty early on in the season, and if/when they are, then we could absolutely be talking about Lynchburg as a team that can finish on the podium in November.
