Historically Coronado has been a shoo-in to advance to the state meet, especially the girls’ team. To qualify for state, a team needs to place among the top three teams in their division. Regardless of the number of runners on the roster, a scoring cross country team needs five solid runners. Since the pandemic, we’ve had difficulty fielding a competitive team. Cross Country scoring is based on the top five runners from each team who cross the finish line first. Finish time doesn’t matter as the score is the sum of the place positions of the first five runners from each team. The lower the score, the better. The sixth and seventh runners to finish are pushers because they push back the score of the other teams in the race. Runners on a team who finish after the seventh don’t count in the scoring. In fact, in championship races, only seven runners are entered per team.
For this season, we lost our top two girls to graduation. However, last year the middle school team for girls was strong, with the four best runners in the eighth grade. The quartet of Maesan Everitt, Gwynne Letcher, Carly DeVore and Nadia Roos had times within six seconds of one another. All are now on the high school team with three girls from last season running very well in pre-season training. The three returning varsity-level girls are sophomore Morgan Maske, junior Jaya Jost, and senior Natalia Amkie. This gives us a solid girls’ team even if no others step up.
Our top returning boy runners are seniors Rafael Roos, Jack Shumaker, and Junior Jack Letcher (Gwynne’s brother).
We’ve recently added a new runner with some youth experience who should help, freshman Xavier Marsh. In track last season, another freshman, Nathan Ayan, scored enough points in the distance events to be named the boys’ Track and Field MVP.
Ayan joins the team as an up-and-coming soph. That’s a solid top five. It remains to be seen which runners will step-up to fill the remaining two varsity slots.
