Led by frontrunners Gilbert Boit and Amon Kemboi who went 1-2 in the individual race, No. 6 Arkansas captured the men’s team title at the 2021 Coast-to-Coast Battle in Beantown. The meet was hosted by Boston College in Franklin Park Boston, MA.
Arkansas placed four finishers in the Top six on its way to tallying 39 points while getting better of Syracuse (60pts), Duke (80pts), and Harvard (96pts) – three teams that received votes in the most recent National Coaches’ Poll earlier this week.
Rounding out the Top 10 finishers in the team scoring were Providence in fifth with 150 points, following by Army West Point (174), Yale (190), Dartmouth (246), Columbia (253), and Northeastern (288).
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Boit and Kemboi both stopped the clock at 24:07.4 over the 8,000m course with another pair of Razorbacks Emmanuel Cheboson (24:13.0) and Andrew Kibet (24:13.7) following in fifth and sixth place. They finished between a pair of Syracuse Joe Dragon and JP Trojan.
“I think this is a good start for the team for this season,” said Boit. “I think getting that win today is really nice for the team as we move forward to the next meets.
“It was really hard to get out fast in the first mile. We had to figure out how to get upfront to control the race.
“That’s the deal, when you control the race you feel confident about it, especially when you have teammates there with you.”
Kemboi added: “It was a good race, we did the same thing as we do in our workouts. We kind of started from behind at the start, but we were able to move up at each kilometer until we were in the front.
“We tried to control the pace up front, to let some teammates catch up so we could work together towards the finish. Rather than racing for a time, running as a group was the plan.”
