Another respectable showing for the Trojans at the Autumn Sunrise Invitational at Heritage Christian, hosted by Covenant Christian that featured 12 personal or season bests. Although the team results at the time of this writing are still being sorted out, I know we did not finish on the podium of three. Nevertheless, we had gutsy performances from our fastest to our slowest runner.

I’m going to start by congratulating our exchange student from Spain, Eva Dominguez Gil De Muro on completing her first ever high school cross country race for TK! We had been working on getting her to run three miles continuously and after a hard workout on Wednesday, it was time to strap on the uniform. She finished admirably and I was anxious to see this happen!

All of our JV runners gave it what they had and there were a good handful of personal bests, but there are a few notables I want to highlight. We had the return of Lucy VanDemark who has been battling a stress fracture in her foot all summer and throughout this season. In her first attempt back at racing she led all of our JV crew and it was wonderful to see her gettin’ after it again. Additionally, Ainsley Oliver had a strong showing in 23:38, smashing her previous season best of 25:16, and coming in second for our JV team. She was followed by a breakthrough race by freshman Emma Dykhouse who hit 24:20, which bested her previous fastest time of 25:44, and Laine Hinton with a similar previous best, dropped her time to 24:34.

In the varsity race, freshman Ava Crews continued her streak of impressive performances leading TK with a personal best which shattered the 20-minute barrier in 19:40. She continues to test her limits, and even though she ran a great race, I believe she still has yet to tap her full potential. Following Ava was senior Jessica Durkee who ran a brilliant race, besting her season’s previous time by about 20-seconds and I have a feeling she is going to break 20-minutes before her season is over. Sophomore Holly Velting expressed her fitness by landing a 21:08. She was followed by junior Lindsey Velting (22:20; two seconds faster than her season best), freshman Lydia Schilthroat (22:41; up from 23:25), junior Emma Thompson (22:59; up from 24:21) and senior Kendall Snyder who helped set the tone early for our middle of the pack in 23;15; which was 15 seconds faster than her previous season best.

It was a good day to race and it was a flat course that allowed for some fast times, which is always fun. We had great efforts and I’m pleased with where we are but, we still have work to do if we want to arrive at where we want to be. We beat the two teams in the meet that are in our regional, but I know better than to put too much stock into that at this point, especially since not all of South Christian’s heavy hitters were on hand. I still very much believe in all of our girls and I think we’re heading in the right direction.