Boys: The boys placed 3rd out of 10 teams. Preseason ranking would have put them 6th out of the 10 teams. Liam was out due to the SAT, but the boys had a strong overall performance. The team had groups with target paces to hit for the first 2k of the race and the groups continued to battle hard within themselves and with the rest of the field after that mark. This meet was cancelled last year, so times and places are difficult to compare, but the finishing spread from positions 1-6 was only 58 seconds. Leading that tight pack for us today was Junior Elliott Gough, who was our number 1 runner for the first time in his career.  It is a positive sign to see that from him, because we expect to see guys shuffling around those spots all through the lineup, and he showed that just might be the case. As a whole they are significantly ahead of where they were at this point last season and are not far behind teams that they will need to beat later in the season to advance to semi state as a team.

Girls: The girls placed 2nd out of 9 teams. The girls too were given target paces for the first 2k to help them stay controlled in the first race of the season. Annalyssa beat the field by over a minute. Ella and Clara had the 5th and 8th best freshman performances of the first 2 weeks of meets according to inccstats. Emma went out more controlled than Ella and Clara and ended up running faster every K that the race went on. Claire also got faster as the race went on and ended with about the same time as her first meet last year.

Boys: A solid effort by the boys overall. Top 2 pairs were close to each other and ended slightly ahead of where they started the race. Elliott and Zay finished 16th, Rhys and Liam 18th, Landon and Elijah 34th, Anthony and Anthony 41st, and Dylan and Ty were 66th out of 71 pairs. As a team they finished 6th out of 13 teams. The emphasis for the boys moving forward should be “run like you belong.” They tend to go out too conservative, leading to times that aren’t as good as they could be. All competed hard though and responded well to challenges throughout the race.

Girls: The girls finished first as a team led by Annalyssa and Ella in first, followed by Emma and Clara in 4th, and Claire and Olivia in 7th. The course was pretty torn up by the time the girls ran and this along with the change in course contributed to slower times overall than previous years. However the girls competed hard from the start. Olivia in particular had her most competitive race of the last year. The girls as a whole ran confidently and showed that they are capable of competing with anyone on the right day.

After a long summer training well as a team, and some initial meets this season to get our feet wet, the boys were ready to go out and attack a race.  This was really the first time this season that we had really gone after a full out effort from the gun, and they responded very well. The first meet like that can sometimes put people out too quick, but our guys really did handle it well and put themselves in a great position early, then showed a lot of toughness to finish well.  We have essentially been running with two distinct packs and much of todays race was the same. A couple of cool things from those packs though was that at different points throughout the race, each of those packs was led by someone different. That is a sign that all of them are staying engaged in the full race and are starting to get a better grasp on how to race with  their teammates, which is something that we have been focused on this year.   Then when things started to shake out down the stretch, we actually saw the gap between those two groups shrinking, another point of emphasis for us.  

The meet saw the boys set a ton of PRs: