Former Baler Amanda Boyd competes in Division I National
Championship
Northern Arizona University sophomore Amanda Boyd helped propel
the school’s girls’ cross-country team to a seventh-place finish in
the NCAA Division I National Championship meet on Monday in
Terrehaute, Ind.
Former Baler Amanda Boyd competes in Division I National Championship
Northern Arizona University sophomore Amanda Boyd helped propel the school’s girls’ cross-country team to a seventh-place finish in the NCAA Division I National Championship meet on Monday in Terrehaute, Ind.
A graduate of San Benito High School in 2006, Boyd posted a time of 21:38 over the 3.7-mile course to finish 112th overall out of the 260 top female runners in the country that competed.
Her time was good enough to earn 84 points for her team, which helped put them into the nation’s prestigious top ten list of elite schools.
“It was really exciting,” said Boyd, just hours after the race. “Coming in to the championship, we were ranked 15th in the nation. We were hoping for a top ten finish and we were thrilled to find out that we finished seventh.”
Stanford University captured the female NCAA Division I title and Oregon won the men’s competition.
“This year and the schedule that we have had has been really crazy,” said Boyd who has competed most weeks since August. “For this race I figured it was my last start of the year so I would just let it all out on the course. It was really crowded out there. There were a lot of runners. It was bunched up the whole way.”
But Boyd managed to find a way to edge past as many runners as she could. Finishing well has been the norm for the standout sophomore runner, who finished second in the Central Coast Section in both cross country and track and field’s 1,600m and 3,200m races during her high school career.
At this fall’s Big Sky Conference Championships Boyd placed seventh to earn All-Conference honors and missed making the All-Regional team by less than three seconds.
Boyd managed to earn the trip to the season-ending NCAA Championship via her team’s second-place finish at the NCAA regional qualifying event.
“The competition at this level is a lot more solid than high school,” said Boyd, who was driving from Indiana to Tennessee to celebrate Thanksgiving with family members. “It’s definitely way different – more of a personal commitment because no one is watching you all of the time.
Since earning her full-ride scholarship to the small university Boyd has made the most of it.
As a freshman she started the school year as the 10th ranked player on the team’s depth chart and excelled at her craft so quickly that by the end of her third week on campus she found out that she had made the school’s elite seven-member cross country travel team.
She started the year running near the bottom of the pack but by the end of her freshman year she had moved up to hold onto the No. 5 runner spot on the team.
For most of this season Boyd, who is also a member of the school’s track and field travel squad, was typically either the No. 4 or No. 5 runner on the cross-country team.
“I’m really enjoying it,” Boyd said.
What’s equally impressive is that Boyd has been able to put up such impressive running times on a campus that is situated 7,000 feet above sea level. And not only that, the races she competes in now are nearly a mile longer than the ones she ran in high school – and the work schedule has been much harder than high school.
“It is overwhelming coming from high school to what we do now,” said Boyd in an earlier interview. “In high school, we would run about 8 miles a week for cross country practice. Here, we run 60 miles a week and build up to 70 miles a week. That’s what I’m doing right now.”
And she’s obviously doing it well.
John Bagley can be reached at jb*****@**********ws.com.
