RIPTON, Vt. - Junior Oliver Miatke (Duluth, Minn./Duluth East) placed seventh on Saturday to lead four Saint Michael's College Nordic skiers in the top 24 during the Middlebury College Carnival mass-start 20K freestyle at Rikert Outdoor Center. The event tripled as the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA) Championship and NCAA East Regional Championship and concluded the carnival season.
 
CARNIVAL FACTS

• The Purple Knight men earned their second third-place finish in two weeks, notching 94 points to handily best such traditional powers as Middlebury (80), University of New Hampshire (65) and University of Vermont (48) while finishing behind only Colby College (103) and Dartmouth College (141).
• For the carnival, the Saint Michael's men captured third place (175), trimming Colby (173) and trailing Middlebury (180.5) and Dartmouth (282).
• The women claimed seventh place on Saturday (52), nipping eighth-place Colby (50), and totaled 103 points for the weekend to trail seventh-place Colby by only three points.
• Between the men's and women's Nordic skiers, Saint Michael's took sixth out of 11 schools at the carnival with 278 points, only one point behind fifth-place Colby. 
• The Saint Michael's Alpine and Nordic teams combined to place sixth at an EISA Championship for the fourth time in five years after never previously finishing higher than seventh in the EISA's modern era, since 1994. The College totaled 461 points to edge seventh-place Harvard University by five in a 14-team field.
• Dartmouth won with 982.5 points.

MEN'S LEADERS

• Miatke, 7th in mass-start 20K freestyle, 50:28.6
  • 6th career top-10 finish and 5th this season
• Sophomore Sam Friday (Carbondale, Colo./Roaring Fork), 12th, 50:52.7
  • 3rd career top-15 finish
• Junior Andrew Scanio (Lake Placid, N.Y./Lake Placid), 21st, 52:03.6
• Sophomore Daniel McCollor (Wayzata, Minn./Wayzata), 32nd, 54:01.3
• Junior Michael Brännare-Gran (Haslum, Norway/Dønski VGS), 37th, 54:46.0
• Junior Henrik Wist (Trondheim, Norway/Heimdal VGS), 54th, 58:11.2

WOMEN'S LEADERS

• Junior Zoe Devine (Ely, Minn./Memorial), 24th in mass-start 20K freestyle, 57:13.5
• Junior Evelyn Hudrlik (Forest Lake, Minn./Forest Lake Area), 38th, 1:00:29.7
• First-year Naida Hutchinson (Duluth, Minn./Marshall School), 41st, 1:00:50.7
• Junior Fran Peterson (Barron, Wis./Barron), 50th, 1:02:05.9
• Sophomore Keely Hendricks (Vail, Colo./Vail Ski & Snowboard Academy), 51st, 1:02:21.0
• Sophomore Jersey Miller (Minneapolis, Minn./Saint Louis Park), 58th, 1:04:17.2

NEXT SAINT MICHAEL'S EVENT

• Qualifiers head to the NCAA Championship in Utah in mid-March. The field will be announced early next week.