WINTHROP, Mass. – Simmons College's Kara MacLean (Braintree, Mass.) and Samantha Jaffe (Fayetteville, N.Y.) were both named to the Great Northeast Athletic Conference Women's Cross Country All-Conference team.
The pair was honored by the league by virtue of their respective top-10 finishes in the GNAC Women's Cross Country Championship on October 31 in Standish, Maine.
MacLean finished third in the five-kilometer race with a time of 20:27 for the highest finish in school history in the event.
The senior has been the Sharks' top runner for most of the season, placing first in four of the team's five races and has posted sub-21-minute marks in every 5K that she's competed in. A graduate of Braintree High School, MacLean posted a personal-record time of 20:08.2 to place 70th at the New England Intercollegiate Amateur Athletic Association Championship, which featured runners from NCAA Division I, II and III, at historic Franklin Park in Dorchester, Mass. In last season's GNAC Championship, she finished sixth as the team's top runner with a mark of 21:37, despite battling injuries for most of the season.
Jaffe has been outstanding in her first collegiate season for Simmons. The Jamesville-DeWitt High School product has been either the first or second-best finisher for the Sharks in every race this season. The rookie clocked in at 20:39 to place sixth at the GNAC Championship to garner All-Conference honors. She turned in her best time of the year at the 35th Annual Women's Codfish Bowl on September 26 and finished 32nd overall in the race. She matched her time two weeks later at the NEIAAA Championship.
Simmons finished second at the GNAC Championship and will run again on Saturday, November 14 when it competes at the NCAA Regional Championship hosted by Connecticut College at Harkness Memorial State Park in Waterford, Conn at 11:00 a.m.