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Tiger Trails Recap
September 24, 2017
Hello HXC Community,
It’s hard to believe we are down to our final week as a full team! With temperatures reaching the 90’s, this last week has felt more like early August rather than mid-September. Our meet on Thursday was cancelled due to the heat, which left us only with Tiger trails this weekend. Tiger Trails is an extremely competitive invitational. Although, it’s not as big as Troy, it still had 21 teams competing, including many of the areas best. On Friday, we talked about the importance of our 5th runner going forward. Individual championships are won up front, but team titles are won in the trenches! Cross Country is scored by the lowest point total of each team’s first 5 runners. Often times the 5th runner doesn’t get all the glory of the front runners, but that runner often has the biggest impact on a team score. Even in a perfect score of 15, the 5th runner scores 5 points, which is 1/3 of the score! In an invitational, the 5th runner can impact the team score by almost ½ or more! Last Saturday at Troy in the 8th grade boys division, our team won with 70 points. Brandon, our 5th runner was 34th (34 pts.), which was almost half of our team total! I wanted our team to be aware of just how critical the 5th runner is heading into the last month of the season. Everyone needs to be aware how important they were if they found themselves in the 5 spot during a race.
First off were the 6th grade girls: With only three finishers, we were a bit short handed at the 6th grade level. However, all three girls cracked the top 15 in our top times list and finished in the top 63 of a field of over 200! Sara was 26th place (10:37), Joselyn 57th place (11:33), and Kendall 63rd place (11:48). The 6th grade boys were up and ran hard in tough conditions! James was flirting with a top 10 finish but just missed out by 8 seconds and finished in 16th place (9:33). Kyle was 36th place (10:06), Emilio 61st place (10:36), Matt 108th place (11:25), Ben 109th place (11:34), Nolan 112th place (11:38), Cameron 138th place (12:16), and Eric 144th place (12:26).
7th grade girls were up next, and they battled hard in securing a 2nd place trophy to Yorkville. Olivia 2nd place (12:39) once again battled Alex Stewart from Yorkville, and this time Alex was able to get the individual win. Hopefully, we get to see the rubber match between these two in a few weeks at state! Tori 4th place (12:43) battled former classmate Alexis Wasserberg from Yorkville edging her by just one second! Kenzy had a nice bounce back race in 16th place (13:36), Lizzy 22nd place (13:55), Gracie 27th place (14:07), Amanda 33rd (14:48), Olivia 60th place (16:17), and Jazlyn 61st place (16:19). In the boys division, we had an unexpected illness, so we were not able to field a complete team. The four boys we did have all finished in the top 58 in a field of 185 runners! Aryan just missed a medal in finishing 14th place (12:00), Carter 30th place (12:33), Quinn 37th place (12:44), and Charles 58th place (13:25).
With the temperatures now in the 90s, the 8th graders were up. Our girls used a 42 sec. 1-5 split to win their third straight Tiger Trails Championship! Kailey went up to receive the trophy for the team. Kailey is coming off a surgery from last week, so it was great to have her back with the team! Devon was able to get the first win of her career in finishing 1st (12:04), Megan was 2nd place (12:05), Jenna 5th place (12:30), Kate 10th place (12:46), Ella 11th place (12:47), Katelyn 31st place (14:17), and Trinity 71st place (16:48). Going into the boy’s race, we knew we were going to get a solid effort from Yorkville. In the tightest race of the day, we were able to slip by the defending champions by 1 point! This again illustrates how important every place is and to not let up until the finish line! Top finishers were Nate 2nd place (10:41), Jay 3rd place (11:04), Ryan 3rd place (11:16), Aiden 13th place (11:48), Brandon 14th place (11:50), Ty 17th place (11:59), Brock 18th place (12:03), Nate 22nd place (12:14), Andy 24th place (12:16), Eli 41st place (12:54), Rocco 46th place (13:07), Zach C. 47th place (13:08), Zach N. 70th place (13:44), Mario 81st place (14:11), David 84th place (14:14), Justin 113th place (15:34), and Will 127th place (16:28).
This upcoming week, we have our Chipotle fundraiser on Monday, Conference on Thursday, pre-city pasta dinner on Friday, and the City Meet on Saturday. Tomorrow Chipotle will donate 50% of their profits between 5:00-9:00 to our XC team! Please help spread the word, and hopefully, we can get a nice turnout right after practice! Thursday’s conference meet will be held at Oswego High School. Directions can be found on HXC under the schedule tab and clicking on the meet. There will be two races, but it will be scored over all grades and genders with top ten athletes in each grade/gender getting a ribbon. Friday will be our annual pre-city pasta dinner, and the cost is $5 per athlete. Pick up will still be at 5:20. Saturday will be the City Meet at Lincoln Park! This is a meet we take much pride in! HXC is the defending champions in both boys and girls divisions. The boys will look to repeat and get our third city title in four years, while the girls will look for a four-peat while vying for our eighth city title in the last nine years! Race order will go as follows: girls varsity (top 7), boys varsity (top 7), girls open (everyone else), and boys open (everyone else.) In each race, the top 10 runners will get a plaque. This is a great opportunity for our open runners to earn some hardware! Girls’ varsity will need to be at Lincoln Park by 8:00 and everyone else by 8:30. No busing to the city meet.
Captain applications will also be available this week. Any 7th grader interested in becoming a captain during the 2018 season can see me this week for an application. Captains will be chosen on a tentative basis with final captains being named during the first week of next season. As I mentioned earlier, this will be our final week as a complete team. Although I would like to keep everyone on the state team, IESA bylaws permit us to only keep ten. We are allowed 7 runners and 3 alternates to bring to sectionals and state if we qualify. The state team is chosen by the times’ athletes have run over the course of the season. Although we can only bring 10 athletes to sectionals, any athlete, not making the state team or participating in a winter sport, is more than welcome to join us at practice if they choose. Also, any athlete not making the state team can turn in their uniform to Mr. Butcher or myself next week. Uniforms are brand new this season, so please get them turned in as soon as possible. As always, thanks for all the support! #runhxc #beelite
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