On Thursday, October 12, the CHS cross country team competed in the North County Invite, its last meet before the Conference Championships. The meet was hosted by Marysville-Pilchuck HS at the Cedarcrest Golf Course in Marysville.

The meet included all seven of the schools in the Cascade Conference as well as other 1A and 2A schools from up North and 3A and 4A schools from Wesco – 20 schools in all.

The meet is run in races by grade levels, so it gives the younger kids, especially the boys, an opportunity to shine. The course was a little sloppier than previous years because of the rain that we have had, so the times seemed a bit slower this year than previous.

It is hard to compare times in XC since every course is different. Bellevue Invite is so very flat that almost everyone has season p.r.’s from that course. But, given the relatively comparable terrain courses from the past three weeks, Sunfair, South Whidbey and North County, most of the runners had season bests from this Thursday’s meet.

The scoring was done with each team’s top five placers irregardless of the race instead of top five times. The girls team finished in 8th place and the boys team finished in 13th place.

The girls team were led by three top 10 finishes by Cara Strodel, Jessica Beam and Katie Bunker. The top boy runners were Mason Heller, Josh Ward (also finishing in the top 10 of his race) and Tony Minaglia.

It wasn’t an rosy picture for all of the runners, as some of them had an off day. But, I felt that it was another step forward to making us a better team and getting us ready for next week. Obviously, the four runners with top 10 finishes had good days. The athletes of the meet for this meet are Glynis Bawden and Zach Rakus.

Both of them have shown a lot of improvement as the season has progressed. Zach has dropped his time by 3 mins from a month ago. Glynis finished as our # 5 girl on Thursday and has seen her times drop by 1 ½ mins from a month ago.

The next meet is the Cascade Conference Championships held at Lakewood HS on Oct 20th. Both squads are looking to vastly improve upon last year’s poor showing and look to get into the top three or four teams.