The Marshalltown girls’ track and field team endured another long layoff before hosting the Iowa Alliance Conference meet on Tuesday night at Leonard Cole Field.

Thirteen days after their last competition, the Bobcats were left looking for one point they’d missed out on.

Des Moines Hoover passed Marshalltown at the buzzer, outscoring the Bobcats enough in the final race to take fifth place by one point during Tuesday’s conference meet.

Hoover used the final two relays to overtake Marshalltown in the team standings to send the Bobcats back to sixth place. MHS entered the meet with the goal of placing fifth and presided there for most of the night, but the Huskies finished stronger than the Bobcats.

“I challenged them to be a top-five team in our conference,” said MHS head coach Chad Pietig, “and we missed that goal by one point. So our first conversation was to just look back throughout the night and look where we could have found two points.

“That’s part of being a competitive team is in these meets you are looking for points, so we talked about that.”

The Bobcats also went searching for more time, and some of them managed to drop it.

Sophomore sprinter Grace Christensen chopped 34-hundreths of a second off her 100-meter dash time en route to finishing second in the conference behind Roosevelt’s Julia Knapp. Christensen clocked in at 12.56 seconds, while Knapp won at 12.45.

“That’s a huge time drop,” Pietig said. “She has been stuck at that 12.8, 12.82 mark all season long, and you could tell the last couple of weeks she was starting to feel the pressure a little bit. To see that breakthrough tonight — fantastic.”

Christensen’s silver medal was the shiniest of the Bobcats’ medal haul on the night. The 4×200 relay team of Bailey Garland, Erandy Ibarra Madrigal, Leia Hernandez and Christensen clocked in at 1:53.45 for third place.

Anela Villareal reached 4 feet, 8 inches, to finish fourth in the high jump, while Leah Graves gave the Bobcats a boost in finishing fifth in the long jump (14-9). Teammate Faith Sommerlot narrowly missed out on eighth place, clearing 13-1 1/4 for ninth.

MHS freshman Grace Whitmore clocked a new career-best time in the 3,000, finishing fifth in 11:54.04.

“It’s been a goal for over a month now, the five weeks we’ve been working on trying to get under 12 (minutes) and she did tonight,” Pietig said. “I really liked how hard she competed. We picked out a couple of runners who we thought could break 12 and said ‘those are your targets,’ and she went with them and hung with them as long as she could.”

Marshalltown’s 4×800 contingent of Drea Ceren, Mallory Meyeraan, Anessa Morrison and Kendall Brummel also picked up fifth place in 10:56.16, and the distance medley quartet of Flolangel Dessin, Sommerlot, Emerson Mason and Lily Johnson took fifth in 5:08.66.

Ceren secured another top highlight for the Bobcats by breaking her personal record on the way to sixth place in the 1,500. She bettered her previous best time by more than three seconds with a 5:32.08. Johnson took ninth in 5:57.10.

Ceren’s opening leg of the 4×800 produced her best 800-meter time as well, Pietig said.

The shuttle hurdle relay team also took sixth with a season-best clocking, as Chloe Hoogensen, Geneva Spitzli, Brooklynn Hazen and Lorelai Villareal finished in 1:16.65. Spitzli went on to finish ninth in the 100 hurdles with a lifetime-best of 17.53.

“Tonight’s a lot of mixed emotions,” he said. “There were a lot of fantastic things to be really happy about and really proud of, and then there were some other things where you’re just still scratching your head because you only have a week left before districts.

“We’re happy for the good things and there’s a little bit of concern for some of the areas where we just didn’t quite come through like we’d thought.”

Garland just missed on her season-best in the 200, finishing in 27.80 for seventh place, while the sprint medley (Madrigal, Hernandez, Christensen, Garland; 2:04.11) and 4×100 (Garland, Madrigal, Hernandez, Christensen; 53.97) relays both placed seventh.

The 4×400 team of Mason, Sommerlot, Meyeraan and Sophia Richardson finished off the meet with an eighth-place finish in 5:04.04.

Olivia Wise scored for the team with her eighth-place finish in the discus (81-10), and she also placed ninth in the shot put (30-3 1/2). Avery Buschbom was ninth in the discus with a personal-best distance of 77-8.

Meyeraan added an eighth-place finish in the 800 (2:43.62), while Morrison was 10th (2:46.81) in the same event. Adele Beek took 11th in the 400 with her season-best time of 1:15.90.

“There’s plenty to be happy about, but yet we still have some work to do on some of our relays that are a part of our goals for next week,” Pietig said in advance of the state-qualifying meet on May 14 at Waukee Northwest. “Those goals are still out there in front of us. We hoped we were a little bit closer to them tonight, we didn’t get as close as we wanted to be, but they’re still there and we still have a chance.

“We’re not at a level where we can just be close. We have to be perfect, and it seemed like in every relay, there was always one person who just didn’t have their best race.”

Ames had its best foot forward, compiling 203 points for a runaway conference crown. Des Moines Roosevelt was second (116), followed by Ottumwa (110), Mason City (70), Hoover (50), Marshalltown (49), Des Moines East (39), Fort Dodge (37), Waterloo East (25), Des Moines North (22) and Des Moines Lincoln (13).