By Jonathan Sager, Staff Writer
Over the weekend, the River Hill cross country team traveled to Cary, North Carolina, to compete in the Great American Cross Country Festival. The meet, held from Friday, October 2 to Saturday, October 3, featured runners from high schools across the country.
Due to the meet’s wide scope, drawing runners from across the country, River Hill decided to put their best foot forward for this meet and selected their best runners on the team to compete in the meets red invitational and white invitational. As Coach Boothe explains, “we selected the top 15 based upon time for both the boys and girls teams.”
The team departed from River Hill on Friday morning and spent the next five hours riding the bus down to North Carolina. Senior captain Jayden Brown explains how they passed the time on the bus by “playing imposter, sleeping but mostly spending a lot of time on their phones.”
Once the team had arrived in North Carolina, Boothe recounts how the team “got checked into their hotel, did a shakeout, 20 minute run, and then had a team dinner.” After dinner, the team went to bed prepared for the day of races that awaited them.
The three mile course in North Carolina was a perfect mix of challenge and speed. Boothe emphasizes “how the first, almost 600, 800 yards of the course are on a downhill. It’s a very unique thing for any course. So really fast, and then you go into a flat area into a wooded section. So the 1st mile in this particular course is super fast.” Despite the relaxed start, the course was tough. “This year, we were basically running in the sand,” Brown said. “And we were sinking into, like, every single step.” Adding on to the difficult running surface, the course features, as Boothe describes, “a good 400-600 yard uphill section,l” which adds on to the difficulty of the course.
Despite the challenges presented by the course, the team was able to have an incredibly successful meet. Junior Ananth Shanbhag exclaims with excitement that “this race was the first time I had ran a sub 18 minute time, so it was a big personal record for me.” Other runners had big personal records including
On the boys team, Landan Daniel with a time of 17:54, and Mahith Venmuganti with a time of 18:44. On the girls the personal bests included Joceyln Ming with a personal best of 23:07, Vivian DeVries with a time of 23:17 and Caralynne McCoy with a time of 23:18.
After both races concluded the team left soon after to take a long five hour bus ride back to Maryland. As a whole the team did well at the meet with the girls coming in a whopping eighth out of 44 teams with Sophomore Charlotte Flanigan coming eight out of around 300 runners. The boys also did well, coming in 13th out of 40.
The team hopes to use this strong performance as a stepping stone to further successes. Boothe emphasises how right now the team is, “for lack of better words, locking in for like the last part of the season,” and he hopes that the team will use their trip to North Carolina as a morale booster for future successes.