Now that most early Cross Country Invites are over, San Diego Schools have begun the league competition season. The City Conference schedule consists of weekly cluster meets at Morley Field, with the Western League running on Tuesday, the City League on Wednesday, and the Eastern League on Thursday. Coronado, La Jolla, Crawford, High Tech High (SD), Clairemont, Our Lady of Peace, Saint Augustine, and San Diego are in the Eastern League.
All leagues use the same 3.11-mile City Conference Course. League scoring uses dual meet matchups instead of Invite scoring, where each school in a cluster ranks against all others. In the old days, we had many school-to-school races with small fields that took forever to complete. Thankfully, we no longer do that. All schools run simultaneously, with the dual meet matchups extracted from the overall results. Although one cluster would yield matchups for all schools, our league targets specific contests for each scoring cluster.
Last Thursday, our matchups were against San Diego and Crawford. The girls won both contests with scores of 18-41 over San Diego and 15-44 over Crawford. The boys split with a close 27-30 win over Crawford and a 19-40 loss versus San Diego. The next scoring cluster will be on October 26, when we’ll contest the remaining dual meets. The other clusters are for non-scoring JV meets. All returning runners scored personal records, with the most impressive turned in by junior Jack Letcher. His 18:33 time was nearly 2 ½ minutes faster than what he ran last season.
Our top finisher in the boys’ overall race was senior Rafael Roos with a 66 second PR of 17:54. Sophomore Nathan Ayan followed him with 18:32, then Letcher. Senior Jack Shumaker and freshman Xavier Marsh were the other two varsity finishers.
The top finisher for the girls was sophomore Morgan Maske with a 1 minute 28 second PR of 21:31. Next for us across the line was freshman Gwynne Letcher (22:16), then freshman Carly Devore (22:39), freshman Nadia Roos (22:41), and junior Jaya Jost (22:56) to complete the scoring. Our pushers (6th and 7th finishers) were freshman Maesan Everitt (23:30) and Sophomore Mia Sarchi. Freshman Edie Alicandri was our 8th finisher.
In the boys’ JV race our top finisher was freshman Tyler Horton in 22:14 followed by sophomore Oscar Alicandri, junior Austin Litteral, sophomore Philippe Solla, freshman Oliver Surdykowski, junior Carlos Pulido, and sophomore Mark Martinez.
