Varsity Girls: Alamosa Packs It Up and Ships a Trophy Back Home
From a very early stage in the race, it was apparent that Alamosa's girls had a fixed strategy--stick together as closely as possible and see what comes of it.
So, while Pueblo West's Shyanna Holcomb broke off the front end of the pack, the Alamosa girls--a couple of whom might have been otherwise inclined to see just how serious Holcomb was about breaking from the peloton--stayed back and stuck together.
Before some late-race attrition to that pack, the Mean Moose was keeping a solid five in the top ten of the race.
Nobody in the race ever did see much of anything of Holcomb but her backside--and, for most, even those views were kind of distant.
Two other girls did eventually make a break from the Alamosa pack and establish positions of their own. Fountain-Fort Carson's Kristen Farmer would actually close a little on Holcomb late in the race and finish at 20:25, eight seconds behind Holcomb.
Like Farmer, Florence's Kylie Simshauser would run more or less the entire second half of the race as a solo effort and finished in 20:29. Both Holcomb and Simshauser are freshmen, signaling some enjoyable years ahead for fans of high school cross country in the lower Arkansas River valley.
The team race was, however, never in doubt. Though Alamosa dropped a few places here and there in the last mile, it was never such that the overall lead was anywhere in doubt. Lilly Lavier finished 4th in 20:46. Two places behind her was Tara Sowards, and three places back of Sowards was Brittany Lopez. Alliyah Molina and Emily Lavier finished the scoring in places 12 and 13.
At 44 points, Alamosa was well below half the total of second-place Fountain-Fort Carson.