It was hard to hear over the crackling of the rain-soaked speakers, but when the No. 21 Penn State women's cross-country team rose to accept their award, everyone seemed to notice.

You could say the Nittany Lions dominated the rest of the field, but that wouldn't really give justice to their performance at Saturday's Spiked Shoe Invitational.

In cross country, points are awarded based on the place a runner finishes in with the first-place runner receiving one point, the second runner receiving two and so forth. A team's first five runners to finish are the only ones to score.

The Lions swept the top five places to earn a perfect score of 15. Even better, was the fact that their next three runners also finished before anyone else came across, not wearing the blue and white.

Led by junior Molly Landreth, the Penn State squad took the lead early and never looked back. Landreth won the race with a time of 21:19.67. She was followed by junior Chelsea Lenge, senior captaon Katy Hillard, and senior team captain Maureen Thomas, who were all within two seconds of each other.

"I couldn't be more proud," Hillard said. "We just wanted to start it off right and keep going."

With her team's spectacular performance, Penn State women's cross-country coach Beth Alford-Sullivan's also earned her first ever prefect score in over a decade. Not even during her time coaching powerhouse Stanford did her team place all five team members in the top five.

"Our kids really worked their buns off," said Alford-Sullivan. "It was a great day."

Duquesne University took second with a team score of 102. Youngstown State (111) and Allegheny (112) grabbed third and fourth place respectfully.

"A meet like this can be deceiving," said Alford-Sullivan, acknowledging that Penn State was the only Division-I team in the race. "We know the competition wasn't extremely difficult."

Alford-Sullivan, though happy with her team's performance, is ready to move on to bigger competition.

"Next week should be pretty heavy," said Alford-Sullivan. "We're going to train real hard for the next few weeks and taper down later in the season before we go to Notre Dame and Minnesota."

According to Landreth, the team is "incredibly excited" that the season has finally begun.

The team has a lot to be excited about, also. With their impressive performance on Saturday, the team made an early statement that they're ready to compete for a Big Ten Championship.

"We're much better than we were last year," Alford-Sullivan said. "We've got much better quality, and we've got a lot more depth than we have had in the past. We still have a long way to go, but we're still very excited about our chances this year."