Isabelle Schmitz runs 19:44.8 to win the 40th Roy Griak Invitational on its new course
Minnesota's women scored 26 points at Fort Snelling Golf Course, the first Griak away from Les Bolstad; Schmitz won the 6 km by 8.7 seconds.
Photograph: the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, by Bob Wesen, public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsThe Roy Griak Invitational turned 40 on Friday and moved house. After every edition from 1986 to 2025 at the Les Bolstad Golf Course, Minnesota took its meet to Fort Snelling Golf Course in St Paul, and the home team made the new course its own. Isabelle Schmitz, from Hutchinson, Minnesota, won the women's 6 km in 19:44.8, 8.7 seconds clear of second place, and the Gophers scored 26 points for the team title, their fourth Griak win in eight years.
No woman has ever run the Griak faster. The best at Les Bolstad was 20:10.0 by Kim Smith of Providence in 2004, and Schmitz's time is the first mark at Fort Snelling, where a true freshman teammate was third in 19:57.3 in the second race of her college career. Minnesota's whole scoring five finished inside the top ten. Schmitz is the fifth Gopher to win the individual title and the second in three years.
Minnesota's men finished fourth with none of their top seven on the line; they race the Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational in Illinois a week later.
Schmitz said the win was a confidence boost for her and the team, and that it meant a lot to set a personal record at home. That is about as much as a cross country runner says in September. The times do the rest.
Sources: University of Minnesota Athletics; NCAA.com.
