Chile Pepper Festival next challenge for No. 25 Arkansas
FAYETTEVILLE – No. 25 Arkansas competes in the 38th annual Chile Pepper Festival on Saturday among a field of 68 teams at Agri Park with the women’s Harter Habanero 5,000m race starting at 11 a.m.
A live stream of the meet will be available through subscription service runnerspace.com. Live results will be available through flashresults.com at this link. Information on schedule, parking and course maps is available at Chile Pepper Festival website.
Last week, Isca Chelangat produced an impressive debut as a Razorback as she won the Gans Creek Classic in a meet record and earned SEC Runner of the Week honors. In the Chile Pepper race she will be joined by a pair of teammates making their season debut in Paityn Noe and Emmaculate Chepngetich.
“We’re going to open up Emma and Paityn this weekend, they both look really good,” noted Arkansas women’s cross country coach Marc Burns. “Emma is a freshman and this will be her first collegiate race. Paityn is an experienced veteran that’s coming back and she will open some eyes that she’s going to be back at a high level.
“We’re excited to see where Emma and Paityn open up this weekend and go from there. We’ll find out if we have a couple more low sticks. Over the course of this season we’ll see if Paityn is getting back to the level she was in placing seventh at the 2024 NCAA Championships.”
Arkansas freshmen who occupied places 2-3-5 among the Razorback crew during their collegiate debut at 6,000m in the Gans Creek Classic will race over 5,000m on the Agri Park home course.
Braelyn Combe (20:18.5) and Gabbie Bishop (20:18.6) placed 27th and 28th last week while Marissa Ferebee (20:59.0) finished 70th. Jayden Hill, a junior who sports a career best 2:00.03 in the 800m, contested her first cross country race and delivered a time of 20:37.3 to place fourth among the Razorbacks and 43rd overall.
“Among the freshmen on our team we think Emma will be in our top three the way she’s looked in practice,” stated Burns. “Braelyn and Gabbie, I think, are going to just get better each week, so we anticipate them being certainly in our top five to seven.
“The goal will be to be strong enough that we could have a different top five every meet. That’s when you know you have a really good team, when you have seven or eight runners that can all be intermixed and you still win championships. That’s the goal, to have that depth.”
SEC teams entered in the Chile Pepper Festival include Mississippi State and Texas. Additional schools from the South Central Region include North Texas and UT Arlington.
“We’re just looking to see a good team effort, get a little better glimpse of what we have as a team and how we match up with Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Mizzou, who we saw this past weekend and they ran a great race on their home course,” Burns said.
In the national rankings this week, Alabama leads SEC schools at No. 10, followed by South Carolina (12), Florida (13), Missouri (22), and Arkansas (25). SEC schools receiving votes for the top 30 poll include Kentucky, Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
