It’s always nice to have five of your top runners finish in the top 10 of a meet, but it’s especially nice on your home course.

The ISU women’s cross country team did that Saturday in the ISU Open at the ISU Cross Country Course.

Not only did the Cyclones have five runners finish in the top 10, they also had eight of the top 14 runners, and the lowest Cyclone finisher was 19th out of the 45 competitors, not counting the competitors who were running unattached to protect their redshirt status.

Sophomore Lisa Koll won the race, finishing the 5K course in an outstanding season-opening time of 17 minutes, 57.7 seconds.

Koll said the key to her race was taking it easy in the first half mile.

“I felt really good because I went out nice and easy the first half mile,” Koll said. “That allowed me to push it up the hills and starting kicking it in the flats.”

Freshman Kelsey Bulat finished second with a time of 18:24.6.

Coach Dick Lee said Bulat would have liked to stay a little closer to Koll but was just not as fresh.

“Lisa [Koll]’s legs were just a little bit fresher,” Lee said. “It showed that Kelsey [Bulat] ran a week ago and Lisa didn’t.”

Senior Jenny Mockler finished sixth at 19:34.2 and freshman Paige Ties, in her first race as a Cyclone, finished eighth at 19:45.8.

“I haven’t really had a good race here in the past,” Mockler said. “It was a really good opener for me, though.”

Sophomore Erin Penticoff rounded out the quintet of Cyclones in the top 10, finishing 10th. The other three runners representing the Cyclones, Mackenzie Madison, Kim Brown and Dana Peters, finished 12th, 14th and 19th, respectively.

Iowa State also had three runners run unattached. Those were Brittany Rover, who finished 15th, Rachel Bell, who finished 19th, and Megan Fliss, who finished 27th.

Lee said the thing he was most pleased with was that everyone ran well in the second half of the meet.

“We need to keep improving week by week and it will be a fun year, “Lee said.