Once again, construction at the site of the next Cross Country meet - our home meet - caused changes to be made to the course. The city is replacing the old asphalt cart paths with concrete cart paths. It just so happens that the part they were updating was along fairway 11 and at the end of the runway of the Excelsior Springs Airport. To avoid the construction, the running path for the meet had to be rerouted. Instead of crossing over the cart path to run alongside fairway 11, it stayed on the opposite side. The only thing it did was to move the finish line a little further up the hill from where it would have been otherwise on fairway 10.
Also, we didn't have any idea how many teams there would be. That was Coach Smarker's (me) fault. Better communication would have gotten the answer fairly quickly. So the starting line had 22 boxes about seven feet wide each. We should have had 29 boxes since the middle school runners were participating, too. It wasn't that big of a deal, though, since the boxes were so wide. The official allowed the runners to spread out before starting the race. It was nice having Chris Rebella as our official.
As for the races, none of the Varsity Girls earned a medal (top 25). Katey, Katelen, and Kenna all finished close together with decent times. None of the Varsity Boys earned medals either, although Seth and Noah finished 26th and 27th respectively. So close! The bad news is that Lane's leg was bothering him too much to give it his all.
The only medal earned went to Kylin Weaver who finished 5th in the JV Girls race. She did it in good fashion by recording a personal record, too. For the JV boys, Owen had a strong race, but came up short on the medal count as well.
In summary, there were three personal records set, all by first year runners, Noah, Kylin, and Owen. Of the Varsity Boys, all but Lane record their best times on the course as did Autumn of the JV Girls. Katelen Patterson missed a course best time by .5 seconds!