Left: Drew Christiansen ran his best 5K of the year at the Proctor Invitational. Drew ran 21:14 for the 3.1-mile event. Above left: Nate Carlson has made great strides as a cross-country runner this year. The freshman ran a lifetime best 21:14 at the Proctor Invitational. Above right: Owen Cruikshank kept a steady pace and ran 24:35 at the Proctor Invitational.
We headed down to the Proctor Invitational for our traditional end of the regular season meet. We joined a dozen other Section 7A teams on a cold, windy day—typical Proctor weather. This meet serves as the season finale for our JV and junior high runners, a final tune-up for our varsity runners, and some years, an intra-team competition for the final Section team positions. Unlike every other meet, we are limited to seven runners at the Section championships. This year’s girls’ team was pretty well set. Our final two spots of the boys’ team were up for grabs between 10th grader Drew Christensen, 9th grader Nate Carlson, and 8th grader Pete Summers. They had been pretty interchangeable this year, so Head Coach April Wahlstrom and I agreed to let the performance in this meet determine the final two spots. All three were convinced they had the secret plan to beat the other two, so…. we’ll see.
Varsity girls finish in top 5
First up was the girls’ varsity/JV race. Team leader Audrey Summers got out well for the Vikings, along with our steady No. 2 runner Matea Acero. Audrey moved up steadily in the 3 lap course, finishing 11th with a personal best (PB) 17:32 for the 2.5 mile course. Matea ran her usual steady race, finishing 18th in 18:01. Junior Sarissa Falk continued her phenomenal improvement the second half of this season, running 25th in 18:19, almost 4 minutes faster than she ran the course last year, as well as a PB for her running career. Sara Schield recorded a 1-minute improvement from last year as well, placing 31st in 19:13.
First-year runners Abby Seipke and Emma Olfson both ran right around their best for the season, finishing 37th and 38th in 19:29 and 19:30 respectively. Mara MacDonell rounded out a good team effort with a 20:43 time, just off of her all time best.
The girls finished 5th in the varsity A standings. At the same time, firstyear runner Cailan Carpenter closed out her first season with a fine 22:58 time, placing in the middle of a tough JV field.
2nd place for up-and-coming girls
In addition to the fine young runners on our varsity team (Matea and Abby are 8th graders and Emma is a 9th grader), we have an excellent group of first-year 7th and 8th grade girls. The pace for this race was going to be especially fast, since it was only a little over a mile, our shortest race of the season. Morgan Weyrens-Welch and Ruby Walsberg got out best for the Vikings earning ribbons for their 9th and 10th place finishes in 8:05 and 8:07 respectively. Molly Thomas and Lily Gruber-Schulz were only a short distance back, finishing 18th and 20th respectively in the 60-girl field, running 8:27 and 8:28. Our final junior high girl, Jasmine Swenson closed her season with an 8:40, 24th place finish – earning our young girls a 2nd place finish in the team standings. Next year is going to be a lot of fun, with no one graduating and all this young talent coming back!
Friendly competition for varsity/JV boys
Finally, to the Varsity/JV boys’ race. Not only were we having the competition for our Section team, we decided to put all 12 of our boys in this race, despite the fact that seven of them were eligible for the junior high race. As expected, team leaders Ben Seaton and Joey Chmelik led the team out in the 100-runner event.
Near the middle of the field, our only senior, Alex Ditmanson, led our main varsity pack of six, with our four JV runners spread throughout the rest of the field.
Ben finished 17th in 18:52, a minute better than last year and just off his PB. Joey was 2 places back in 18:58, his first run under 19:30—a great race.
Meanwhile, our intra-squad competition was going on—kind of. Pete was in front of our big group, regularly looking back to find Drew and Nate, who were running and talking side-by-side throughout the first lap. We coaches were not too impressed with this apparent lack of effort. We were wrong though, as all 3 ended up having their best 5K (3.1 mile) race of the season. Pete held them off, just barely, in 21:14. Nate and Drew sprinted to the same time of 21:15.7, with the electronic timer giving Nate the edge. Nice job guys.
Alex was just in front of these guys in 21:00, as was the ever-dependable Will Seaton in 21:12 and the tremendously improved Sean MacDonell in 21:14. Meanwhile, Everett Hommes had a big 1 minute improvement in 22:24, steady Roman Schnobrich ran his 5th 5K in the 23s, this time 23:21, Owen Cruikshank ran 24:35, and the hardest worker on the team, Rusty Day, had a big improvement to 26:43, beating a dozen varsity and JV runners. Overall, our varsity boys were 7th and our JV boys second.
On to Sections!
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