ONA – The Buckhannon-Upshur Lady Bucs capped off a tremendous year with a strong finish in the 2022 Class AAA West Virginia State Cross Country Championships Saturday afternoon at Cabell Midland High School.

The Lady Bucs were ranked fourth in the state in Class AAA in the RunWV.com power rankings heading to the state meet, and that is exactly where they finished in the 12-team field.

The Lady Bucs accumulated 110 points for their fourth-place showing.

Morgantown won the team title with 32 points, while University was second with 77 and Cabell Midland was third with 77. Morgantown and University are both from Buckhannon-Upshur’s Region I.

The Lady Bucs placed two runners in the top six as Lydia Falkenstein was fifth with a time of 19:00.05 and Samantha Shreve placed sixth with a time of 19:01.64 in the 91-runner field.

Shreve made a huge jump in the results improving six spots as she was ranked 12^th going into the state meet.

Both runners earned All-State honors for their finishes.

The other three Lady Bucs scoring were Jessica Williams in 31^st (21:11.90), Miah Reger in 37^th (21:28.22) and Mia Sappey in 40^th (21:36.98).

The rest of the B-U line was Brianna Dalton in 55^th (22:43.66) and Pressley Bowers in 68^th (23:35.41).

It was the second straight trip to states for the Lady Bucs.

“Saturday was a huge day for our program,” stated Buckhannon-Upshur head coach Taylor Stacy. “Lydia finished in fifth and Sam in sixth. Less than four seconds separated them from third place. Jessica finished 31st and the rest of the girls finished strong to bring us to fourth place overall. Only one team from outside of our region beat us, so that really speaks to the strength of our region. It was a huge improvement from our finish in eighth place last year. We really made big strides in taking this program to the next level.”

Morgantown’s Irene Riggs crushed the 10-year-old state record on her way to victory with a time of 16:32.32. The old record was set by St. Mary’s Maggie Drazba with a time 17:17.89.

Riggs has signed to run collegiately at Stanford University.

Hurricane’s Audrey Hall, who took second place, was two full minutes behind Riggs at 18:34.57 while Savannah Pritt of Cabell Midland was third with a time of 18:58.28.

“I am so happy for our kids and to see all of their hard work pay off with such an impressive performance against the best competition in the state,” concluded Stacy.