2024 XC is off and running!!
So this year's squad has two under their belts at this point. After one of the best all around summers for our team, we opened up on the 7th with our very own Cherokee Challenge. This year's team see a lot of new faces to cross country. The team finished 4th in scoring led by Erin Healy 6th in the freshman race, Genisa John 24th in the sophomore race. Maddie Meder 8th in the junior race and Megan Niglio 10th in the senior race. Megan had the fastest time of the day at 12:07. We had 4 girls run under 13 minutes and 9 run under 14 minutes. This was a very exciting meet as we got to see a lot of newcomers spike up for a cross country meet for the first time.
We followed the Challenge up with a return to the RVA relays in Mechanicsville Virginia. This marks our first combined trip with the boys program since 2019, which coincidentally was at the same meet. The girls team had quite the day out of everyone that competed. The B and C relays both finished 7th in the combined B and C races. In the B race, first year runner Sofia Recinto clocked 9:34 over the 2500m course handing off in 6th place. Next up was first year runner Genisa John who clocked an impressive 10:15 and moved the team up to 5th. Emily Butler was our third leg and went on the hunt to move the team up to 4th. Gabby Urban was our 4th leg with a 10:01 split and dropped back to 5th. Veronica Ashcraft seeing her first race of the season split 10:27 to finish the team 7th out of the 41 teams in the B race. Their combined time was 49:30.
The C team was led off by Grace Gorsline splitting10:25. She handed the baton to freshman Kyla Petragnani who split 11:27. Kyla handed it over to Alexa Butler with an 11:05 carry, 4th leg was first year runner Sonal Patel who split 11:09 and Freshman Chloe Burdette anchored the relay with a 10:15 split. Their total team time was 54:38. They finished 7th out of the 20 C teams that raced.
The A race saw our girls place 4th running the 5th fastest time in meet history. Megan Niglio led things off with a split of 8:27 handing off to Maya Kumar in 6th place right next to 5th. Maya split 9:01 and moved the team up to 4th place. Grace Wojciechowski was leg 3 with a split of 9:11 and moved the team up to 3rd. Freshman Erin Healy was our 4th leg and clocked a 9:00 split handing off to first year XC runner Maddie Meder. Maddie closed with a 8:37 split to stop the clock at 44:19 with a 4th place finish. Probably not fair to have an all time list on a course we have only run twice, but both Megan and Maddie ran faster than former standout Kate Rathman's time of 8:39. We had 5 girls faster than our 3rd girl from 2019 and 7 faster than our 5th.
In the open race we saw Haley Emenheiser lead the way clocking 11:25 to place 87th out of the 232 girls that raced. First year runners Joelle Barcenas and Karien Mansour both had great races running 12:12 to place 149th and 13:29 to place 215th respectively.
Let's not leave off the coaches that raced in the open race. Jack Shea destroyed the field clocking a 7:04 over the rolling course. The battle for bragging rights was on between coach Thompson and coach Viscidy. Viscidy went out hard for a long sprinter stepping up to run 2500m. Coach Thompson used his wisdom of slow and steady and didn't let Viscidy's quick start phase him. With about 600m to go coach Thompson made his move and tried his best to break coach Viscidy. Youth prevailed as the student rolled past the mentor over the last 100m.Viscidy finished 32nd with Thompson 33rd running 9:04 and 9:11. A shout out to the school for allowing us to go as well as the Cherokee XC and Track Alumni Association(@4xAlumni) and the Cross Country parents Booster Club.
