Erin Hooker maintained a top-20 position throughout the girls' race. Photos by Alan Versaw.
It isn't impossible to find a team that has finished better than the Fort Collins girls at Nike Cross Nationals the last four years. It's just that you don't need a full set of fingers to count those teams.
Once again proving that those in the know of high school girls' cross country don't really know Fort Collins, Chris Suppes's crew exceeded expectations for a 6th-place finish at NXN on Saturday. That finish marks four straight years of finishing no worse than seventh at the nation's premiere high school cross country team showcase event.
In-progress point tallies from the race had Fort Collins holding down fourth through much of the race. That might, under many circumstances, imply that Fort Collins lost ground in the last 100 meters, but it would appear to be more of a case of Wilmington (Tatnall) and Portland (Jesuit) finishing with a surge than a case of Fort Collins slipping. Some differential is also accounted for in the shifting of point totals when individuals are pulled from the scoring at the end of the race.
Regardless, the crew of seven led by Erin Hooker (19:16.9, 17th) and Marci Witczak (20:04.4, 54th) positioned themselves nicely without overextending their stores of adrenaline early in the race. And their 6th-place finish elevated them several places above where most had them picked. A two of the remaining three scorers for Fort Collins, Audrey Oweimrin and Michelle Kramer, were running in their first national championship race.
For a young team, Fort Collins made very few mistakes.
Louisville (Monarch), on the other hand, did encounter some of the miscalculations altogether too common to teams running at NXN for the first time.
The pace of the field is exceptionally unforgiving. It's difficult to move up at NXN on an ordinary day at Portland Meadows. It is especially difficult to move up on a day where close to half of the course either began as slop or has been churned into greasy mud by spike-studded shoes.
From the earliest moments of the race, all of Monarch's lineup except Claire Green were pushed toward the back of the field by the torrid pace. Between 3000 and 4000 meters, Kent Rieder's team began moving up seriously through the ranks of fatigued competitors but it was simply a case of too much to make with to little race remaining to do it in.
In the end, Louisville would finish a respectable 15th (I'm pretty sure that in most national championship races, there is no non-respectable finish), and already harboring dreams of coming back next year and proving themselves better than this year's finish.
Colorado's three individual qualifiers were led by the 44th-place finish of Kristen Kientz in 19:56.3. Following her were Hannah Everson and Kailie Hartman in 81st and 138th, respectively.
Kristen Kientz kept her uniform cleaner than most en route to a top-50 finish as an individual.