The 2023 cross country season ended last Saturday at Fresno’s Woodward Park at the California State Championships. This was the girls’ team’s 30th trip since 1987 to state, either as a team or as individual qualifiers. Before COVID, the girls had a 14-year streak at the state meet that ended in 2000 when the meet was canceled. Since then, we’ve been rebuilding but could not qualify anyone for the 2021 and 2022 seasons. This season, thanks to four freshmen joining our team from the middle school program, we qualified as a team by placing third at the CIF finals.
The California State Meet is very competitive, with ten races in five divisions (girls and boys). Each race has around 200 top runners by division in the state, so the starting line is a bit crowded. Our young team comprised four freshmen, one sophomore, and one junior. For our division (D4), we were the only team with four freshmen running; only six teams had two running, and no other team had as many as three. Out of all the girls’ teams running, with around 1000 girls, only one other school had more than three freshmen on their team.
Our top runner was sophomore Morgan Mask, who clocked 21:08 over the 5000-meter state meet course. Our next finisher was freshman Carly DeVore, with a time of 21:31 followed by freshman Gwynne Letcher (21:34), freshman Nadia Roos (23:10), freshman Maesan Everitt (23:31), and junior Jaya Jost (23:39).
