CHS Islander Cross Country Coach George Green recaps the season and the path to Eastern League Championship:
Up until this season the Islander Cross Country teams competed in a small school league that was once called the Harbor league, but more recently renamed the Central league. The larger schools were in the Western and Eastern leagues with a middle sized league called the City League. For the last few years it became apparent that a City Conference re-leaguing was necessary to equalize the strength of the various leagues in the Conference. It got to the point where we just used the league meets for workouts because there was no competition. The new structure that went into effect this season put us in the Eastern League with 5 larger schools from CIF Division I and II. There are 5 divisions for Cross Country and we are in D-IV. The other schools in the Eastern League are Point Loma, Mira Mesa, San Diego, Patrick Henry, and Hoover. The City and Central leagues were combined to form the City League and the Western League is now composed of the largest programs. Schools were also moved around a bit based on the strength of their programs. Although our girls could compete effectively in any division the boys team faced a real challenge against the larger schools.
My post-season and early season analysis of our chances this year in the Eastern League indicated that our main rivals for the boys would be Point Loma and Mira Mesa. Since our girls’ team is ranked among the best in the county among all divisions, as well as #4 in the state for our division, I knew that they would have no problem with winning the league title. Because Mira Mesa is a D-I school and Point Loma is a D-II school they each have large rosters and each brings over 100 runners to the dual meets. Over the course of this year’s season things played-out as expected. The girls’ dominated and the boys’ races were close. Each week was an adventure until, at the end of the dual meet season, the boys were undefeated with a record of 5-0. Most weeks, on paper, we were the underdogs. But somehow we managed to keep our streak going.
Our first meet on October 5 was a tri-meet with Mira Mesa and Hoover. The boys came out on top with a score for 36 with Mira Mesa placing 2nd with 45 and Hoover 3rd with 47. In cross country the low score wins because the finish positions of the top 5 finishers from each team are added together for the score. A full team consists of 7 runners with the 6th and 7th finishers serving as “pushers” who can increase the score of the opposing team if they can finish in front of the opponent’s 5th finisher. All runners beyond the 7th from each team are not counted in the scoring. For our dual meets the coaches all agreed to allow up to 12 runners in the Varsity races for the boys with the rest in a combined JV meet composed of runners from all 6 schools. Because of smaller girl rosters all girls ran in the varsity races. The boy’s JV meet had up to 190 finishers. This is in stark contrast to our meets in the Central League where sometimes the opponent couldn’t muster enough runners to form a 5-person team.
Our 2nd meet October 12 was a dual meet with Patrick Henry which was a bit of a break for us as they are in a rebuilding phase. The boys won easily by the score of 19-41. The 3rd dual meet was against Point Loma. On paper it appeared that we’d have a tough time with them and at first this appeared to be the case as they went out very fast with most of our kids trailing after the first mile. However at the end we passed most of them and wound up winning by the score of 23-38 and placing 9 of our runners in the top 12 finishers. I think that was a big surprise for them. Point Loma also has the best girls’ team after us so the girls took that race a bit more seriously and we won by the score of 17-39.
Our last dual meet of the season was against San Diego High School on November 2. They always have a good team and they gave us a pretty good race. The final score was 25 – 32. Again the girls had no problem. The final league meet of the season was the League Championships where all teams competed against one-another in the same race. The winner of the finals gets no additional losses, 2nd place gets 1 loss and so on. The Coronado boys go into the finals with zero losses, Mira Mesa with 1, Point Loma with 2, San Diego with 3, Hoover with 4, and Patrick Henry with 5. Even though we were 1-up on Mira Mesa and 2-up on Point Loma it was a tough meet as all three schools were actually pretty close. Hoover and San Diego also figured to play a factor in the scoring. Again the girls were favored to win easily.
As expected the boys’ race was very tight. In fact it couldn’t have been any tighter. With 4 runners from both Coronado and Mira Mesa across the line they had us by 5 points (40-45). Luke Klingenberg was our top runner, placing 4th with a time of 16:34 behind a trio of fast runners from Point Loma, Mira Mesa, and Hoover. Our 2nd finisher, Patrick Harris, was 12th with a PR of 17:41. He was followed by Spencer Busby in 13th with 17:42 and Connor Jaynes in 16th with a time of 17:57. Cole Mullins came across in 19th place compared to the 5th Mira Mesa runner in 24th to tie it up 64-64. Because our 6th and 7th finishers were in front of the 5th Mira Mesa runner they helped to help push up their score by the 5 points needed to tie it up. This is why the 6th and 7th finishers on a cross country team are called “pushers.” Our 6th finisher, Ian Hurlburt placed 20th in 17:33 followed by Danny Mineo who ran 18:10 for 23rd place. The tie-breaker in cross country is the 6th place finisher for each team. That was Hurlburt who had a 6 second lead over the 6th Mira Mesa runner. Not everyone had their best day but we filled-in where needed. Harris had a PR on the course (17:41) and Cole Mullins ran a gutsy race after having a stay-at-home fever 2 days earlier. Cole was nearly 30 seconds off his PR but his 5th place finish for us tied it up. Hurlburt was also off yesterday by about 30 seconds but he finished right behind Cole in 6th to give us the win by breaking the tie. This is a prime example why everyone needs to not give up in races like this. Each of the 7 varsity finishers figured in the scoring to give us the Eastern League Championship. Third place went to Hoover with 76 points followed by Point Loma with 88, San Diego with 104, and Patrick Henry with 114. There were a lot of ways we could have lost this race. For example had Mineo not beat the 5th place Mira Mesa runner by less than a second there would have been a 1-point swing and they would have won by the score of 63-64. This is as close as it gets in Cross Country. The rest of the finishers in the boys’ varsity race were Cole Nichols, Kenneth May, and Charlie Winn.
Casey Harris had the best finish in the boys’ JV with a 9th place finish out of 191 total finishers. His time was 19:08. Also finishing were Karl Mulvehill, Charles Hendrickson, Chris Russell, Andres de la Lama, Eric Siefert, Ryan Bieker, James Cook, Pete Glorieux, Andrew Larratt, and Nicholas Lee. We had only 3 in the girls’ JV race. Josie Morrissey picked up a medal for 23rd place. She was followed by Laura Valades and Abby Fabiszak. Other awards were for the top grade-level athletes. Klingenberg was the top soph boy, Perez the top soph girl, and Tamariz the top junior girl. Klingenberg was also all-league and Perez the Eastern League Champ for 2016.
So that was our path to the Eastern League Championships. Earlier in the season we participated in several Invitational Races including the Stanford Invite on the Stanford Golf course in which the girls made a statement by winning the D-IV race against some of the best D-IV schools in the state. In that race Renee Phillips clocked a Personal Record of 18:20.6 for 5k with Teresa Perez and Jasmine Rippey not far back with times of 18:36.6 and 18:58.4 respectively. In another big meet, the Mt. SAC invite the girls placed 2nd behind the State’s 2nd rated team JSerra by the scores of 68-75. Phillips ran 18:24 of the hilly 2.93 mile course again followed by Perez and Rippey with times of 18:37 and 18:39.
Next up for us will be the CIF Championship this Saturday (at Morley Field) that will qualify us for the state meet. The girls are the overwhelming favorites to repeat as the D-IV champs and the boys are hoping to place in the top 3 to move on to Fresno on Thanksgiving weekend. The boys’ team for CIF will be Luke Klingenberg, Spencer Busby, Patrick Harris, Cole Mullins, Danny Mineo, Ian Hurlburt, and Connor Jaynes. The girls’ team will be comprised of Renee Phillips, Jasmine Rippey, Teresa Perez, Madden Hundley, Naya Tamaiz, Claire Morris, and Katie Larratt.
