NCAA Release | Championship Website

TROY, N.Y. - Senior Grace Tilton will represent Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) at the 2013 Division III Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships at Hanover College in Indiana. The meet is Saturday at 11am.

Tilton, a native of Concord, N.H., earned an automatic qualification by winning the NCAA Atlantic Regional on Saturday when she broke her own course record with a time of 21:07.0. She bested the 269-runner field to win the individual championship (21:07.0), breaking the 6-kilometer course record time she previously set last month during the Geneseo Invitational (Oct. 5) by over 40 seconds.

Tilton has won numerous competitions this fall, including a first place finish at the eight-team Liberty League Championship. She ran the 6K event in 21:23, which was four seconds ahead of the runner-up. She had a 5:44 minutes per mile pace which helped the Engineers finish with 57 points.

Tilton, a three-time Liberty League Performer of the Week, also won the Geneseo Cross Country Invitational, outdistancing that field of 255 by a 29-second margin with a time of 21:48.8 over the six-kilometer course. The former Concord High School standout ran the course in a 5:52 pace. She also won the 4k Hamilton College Short Course Invite in 14:35.1, which helped the Engineers to a team victory.

RPI finished 10th in Saturday's NCAA Regional Meet.

Fifty-six individuals, the first seven athletes from each region who are not a part of a qualifying team, were selected to participate in each championship. Thirty-two teams were selected. The top two, seven-person teams automatically qualified from each of the eight regions, for a total of 16 teams. Sixteen additional teams were selected at-large.