This past Saturday, on what was a chilly morning next to the lake in Springfield, the cross country teams took to the grass to compete in the Jim Murray Memorial Invitational at Champions Park hosted by Northeastern. It was an absolutely perfect day to run, and started out with some great races by Milo Nau and Brennan Dunn in the boys open. Brennen came away with a new season best time, and only seconds off his personal best, crossing the line in 24:27.4. Milo once again ran a new personal record time of 24:27.1, breaking the 25 minute barrier for the first time and shaving 33 seconds off his old PR.

Next up was the girls varsity race, and our ladies did well against a pretty stacked field that included 196 runners representing 26 different schools throughout Ohio. As a team the girls placed 7th overall and were the 3rd division II team only 2 points behind the 6th place overall and second division II team from Union-Scioto. Our ladies ran hard, and competed all the way through the finish, being led by seniors Laila Black (20:45) and Sienna Finton (21:30) who finished in 15th and 30th places overall. Right behind Sienna in 35th place was Sophomore Gigi Perkins with a time of 21:43. Kydee Shults (22:46) and Bryley Wulff (24:12) rounded out the scorers for the girls team. Meryn Berry raced her way to a new PR of 26:10 by taking over 30 seconds off her old best time, and Chloe Moore also set a new PR time of 33:14 by taking a full 43 seconds off her old best time.

The boys varsity race followed the ladies at 9:30 and our team packed up well for a nice finish with our smallest 5 man gap of the season. In another big race that included 179 runners from 30 different schools the Wildcats managed to place 13th overall. The team was led by senior Oliver Crosthwaite in a time of 18:39, and he was very closely followed by Tre'son Henley (18:42), Donovan Schuyler (18:48), Daniel Osborne (19:13) and Kellen Dunn (19:36) to round out the top five and give the team a 5 man gap of less than a minute between the first and 5th runner. Cherif Sore ran a new personal best time of 20:18 to finish 6th for our team and was followed by freshman Kian Gatliff (21:42) and Austin Cook who had a 50 second PR time of 21:43.

This meet concluded the regular season for the Wildcats and we have the upcoming weekend off to rest up and prepare for the SWBL championship which will be held on Saturday October 17th at Fort St. Clair park in Eaton. The varsity races will take place at 9:15 and 10:00 where our teams will look to place in the top of our league and sharpen up our racing before the OHSAA tournament begins the following weekend.