For decades, up until 2018, there were two nearly identical cross country invites held at Rohr Park in Chula Vista in early September. The Otay Ranch head coach, Ian Cumming, hosted the Mustang Invite, and the Sweetwater coach, Tim Latham, hosted the South Bay Invite. Schools rarely attended both. Both coaches are now retired. The two events merged into the Ian Cumming / Tim Latham invite, which Otay Ranch now hosts. The event is large enough for two random divisions, the Mustang division and the Red Devil (Sweetwaters’ mascot) division. Two divisions are needed because otherwise there would be over 50 teams for each race.
This year’s event drew nearly 1800 runners from over 50 teams. Coronado ran in the Red Devil division. Because of the heat wave, the longer races and all others were two miles long. Each race had entries from around 28 schools.
Our top two boys’ performances came from Nathan Ayan, who placed 8th in the boys varsity race with a time of 10:52, and Jack Letcher, who ran 11:01 for 13th place. This was our only race with a full 7-runner team. Vincent Russo was our next finisher at 11:26, followed by Andrew Buck, Xavier Marsh, Nicholas Wosje, and Tyler Horton. Teamwise, we placed seventh behind larger schools, most of which were over twice our size. There were only 16 points difference between 5th and 7th place.
In the boys’ JV race, Anton Youngblood and Oscar Alicandri picked up medals, placing 13th and 14th , respectively, at 13:00 and 13:06.
For the girls, our top two finishers were Morgan Maske and Gwynne Letcher in the varsity race.
We didn’t enter a full team, so we weren’t placed as a team. Maske turned in our highest finish of the day, placing 3rd in 13:00. Letcher followed her closely in 4th with 13:06. Our other two finishers were Maesan Everitt in 34th and Nadia Roos in 41st. We put a quartet of freshmen in the girls’ JV race. Ava Schlomer and Olivia Barker picked up medals in 25th and 31st place, followed by Teaghan Carpinito, and Ella Holman.
All of our freshmen girls are still in a base-building phase but should be coming around by the time we start our league meets in October. Our next race will be the Sundevil Invite at Morley Field on September 21.
More photos of our races from this meet are here.
