Cross country is both a team and an individual sport. Unlike most high school sports, we have only two meets and a final to determine which teams will be the league champs. These meets are called clusters in which all teams run in the same races, one for girls and one for boys. Our first scoring cluster was on October 1s and the second last week on October 15. Dual meet match-ups for each team against all other teams are parsed out of these two meets. The third meet is the league finals, in which a different type of scoring is used to rank each team by score. The dual and final meet records are combined for the final rankings. After both scoring clusters, the boys are fifth in the league, and the girls fourth.
This ranking is not likely to change. It doesn’t matter how many runners are on a cross country team; only the first five count in the scoring. So, for most runners, the Invites and improvements from year to year and throughout the season are most important.
Last Tuesday, Nathan Ayan was our top boy runner in the second scoring cluster. His 17:39 was an eleven-second improvement over last season’s city conference 3.11-mile cross country course. Vincent Russo was only ten seconds back at 17:49. Russo is a transfer from the East Coast, but his time was a twenty-second improvement over the first cluster just two weeks prior. Jack Letcher’s 17:55 was the first time he dipped under 18 minutes and was 38 seconds better than he ran in 2023.
The biggest PR of the day was turned in by Anton Youngblood, who bettered his 2023 time by 2.5 minutes with 20:08. Oscar Alicandri ran 68 seconds better with 20:35 and Chace Smith is coming around in the JV race with a 96-second improvement at 22:36.
In the girls varsity race, Morgan Maske placed fourth with 20:30 and Gwynne Letcher eighth with 21:01, both with significant improvement over last year’s times
