On Saturday, September 12th at 7:30 a.m., the New Haven Cross-Country team arrived at the school to hop on a bus headed to Linn. Both the middle school and high school teams competed at this meet, with the first race beginning at 9:00am.
One of the two middle school girls competed. Grace Allgaier, an eighth grader, received a medal for placing 13th.
Out of the middle school boys, Dominic Lewis and John Hughes earned medals in their race. Lewis received 14th place, and Hughes received came in 15th.
For the high school events, the Varsity Girls ran first, followed by the JV Boys, and then the Varsity Boys ran last.
There wasn’t a team score for the girls because they only had 3 of their 7 runners compete, and 5 runners are needed to qualify as a full team.
Looking forward, there are high hopes for a girl’s team score in future meets. When asked what she was looking forward to the most, Clare Roth commented, “Running as a whole team. I am really excited for when Lucy gets to run again and I am anxious to see when Emily gets to run again.”
The JV Boys were excited with their 3rd place win for the team. Senior, Robbie Cichon, stated “I think I did very well compared to last year. I beat my last time at Linn by 2 minutes and 30 seconds, so I was very happy about that. As a whole I think we looked really good. JV boys got third and Varsity boys beat all the district teams except for Hermann without our best runner.”
Most of the JV team stayed relatively close together with consecutive places. Riley Otten came in 25th as the top JV runner on the New Haven team, with a time of 21:42. Shortly after, Austin Moeckli in 32nd crossed the finish line at 22:29. Dalton Gerdes (22:31) was next in 33rd. The roll continued with Colton Ruediger (22:36) in 34th and Damian Gale (22:38) in 35th. Robbie Cichon (23:12) finished in 46th.
The Varsity boys did not earn a plaque as a team but ended up 8th out of 19 teams. Joseph Rehmeyer, freshman, was the first for the New Haven team and came in 29th place with a time of 19:03. Following Joseph was Keven McDowell (19:28) in 39th. Tim Madden (19:48) placed 54th. Close together, Ryan Blankenship (19:58) ended in 59th place and Martin Lewis (20:08) finished 61st. Then Domenic Olsen (21:28) in 94th, and Alex Majors (21:32) in 96th came through the shoot.
With the successes of the JV team and the individual medalists, the New Haven Cross-Country program has gotten off to a great start this season! Watch their next race in Belle on Thursday, September 17th. The first race starts at 4pm.