The drive to the 5A Region 4 Championship was a bit of an adventure, as the charter bus got pummeled by such high winds the driver felt the need to slow substantially and drive with the hazard lights blinking as he navigated the team through a dust storm on I-25. Conditions were modestly better when the Angels arrived at Spring Canyon Park in Fort Collins, though winds of 25-35mph were going to insinuate themselves into the racing as well as the drive. Maybe some predictably unpredictable Colorado autumn weather was just what the Angels needed to fly further into championship season.

It takes a top-4 finish to qualify for the Colorado State Meet Championship – as a percentage of teams qualifying, no sport in the state is stingier in qualifying for State Championship competition.

Based on seasonal best times, the Angel boys looked like the 5^th best team in the region – about 30 points behind the supposed 3^rd and 4^th best teams in the region. None-the-less, the general feeling from the team and coaches was that the Angels had a solid chance of moving on to the State Meet. Due to injury, illness, and some coaching decisions, the fastest five of the Angel boys had only raced together once all season – at the league meet, where the Angels had run a deceptively strong race, so optimism was not unfounded. The Angels were already counting on their senior ace, Jonas Scudamore, to win the meet, so to reduce the team score by 30 points, the 2^nd through 5^th runners on the team each needed to finish an estimated seven places better than projected for the Angels to advance to State. The Angels runners did all that and a lot more to barrel their way through the proverbial door and into the State Meet. Up front Scudamore ran in the lead pack without taking the lead until about 1200m left to race. While the other top runners didn’t make it easy, he was able to secure his second Regional championship over the final 500m in a course record time of 15:45. The rest of the team made steady work of moving up from their early race positions to finish 9-15 places better than expected. Over the first mile, junior Henry Bennett was running near 15^th place, moved up to 11^th by the 2-mile mark, and eventually finished an impressive 7^th place in 16:22. Junior Isaiah Springer and senior Ben Brown positioned themselves around 25^th place going through the mile; the pair moved into near 20^th place by the 2-mile mark. Brown then held on for 20^th in 16:55,while Springer had a deadly finish, moving all the way up to 14^th in 16:42. Sophomore Emery Wagner was probably as far back as 40^th in the early going; he steadily moved up to eventually take 25^th in 17:10. Those five Angels totaled 67 points – 50 points fewer than projected and 41 points fewer than needed to punch a ticket to State Meet with a 3^rd place finish. Colorado 5A #9 ranked Fort Collins won the team title, followed by Rocky Mountain High School with an identical total to East, prevailing on the 6^th runner rule. Colorado 5A #10 ranked Fossil Ridge was a point back of East, taking the 4^th and final spot for State Meet, ahead of Erie High School with 108 points. Speaking of 6^th runners (the sentence before last), East’s 6^th through 9^th runners were asked to race more aggressively than they are accustomed, as they were to be the team’s insurance should something happen to one of the first five (did anyone else see Emery stumble and then recover with 120m to go?). It turned out that the Angels were in good hands had something unfortunate happened up front.  Junior Jackson Gertge finished 49^th in 18:11(a personal best!) and junior Abraham Morginsky 50^th in 18:14; had any runner other than Scudamore dropped out, East would still have qualified for State with Gertge or Morginsky’s finishes. Had any runners other than Bennett or Scudamore dropped out of the scoring five, Kyle Kojima (54^th, 18:25) and Mason Harper (55^th, 18:28) would have provided enough scoring support for the Angels to have qualified for State. It is impossible to remember a time when East has had a Boys Team race when all nine runners had really, really good days.

There was a little less drama (but for the persistence of crazy wind) in the Girls race – at least for the Angels who had already shown throughout the season that this team was more or less guaranteed to advance to State. In this context, the coaches had asked the girls to practice getting off the starting line a little more aggressively than has been their custom, since there really will be no choice but to be a bit more aggressive from the gun to achieve the team’s goals at State. It looked like many of the girls did indeed get off the line a bit more aggressively and still managed to move up positions throughout the latter miles of the race.

Up front, senior Rosie Mucharsky gave up at least 8 seconds to the NXN/Footlocker Nationals qualifier from Riverdale Ridge over the first mile of the race, closed that gap to 5 or 6 seconds by 2 miles, and then waited until a final furious 200m kick to make up the rest – coming a fraction of a second short to take second place with a time of 17:31; since this was just a rehearsal for State, good lessons were learned. Both runners were substantially under the old course record. Meanwhile, sophomore Corrine Kennedy ran her way into the top-15, running 19:13 for 13^th place. Julieta Ochoa and Avery Johnson moved through at least a half dozen girls after the first mile, working their way up to finish in the top-20 with finishes of 16^th and 17^th place in 19:48 and 19:52 respectively. Junior Scout Chomas was 19^th in 19:58, having also moved her way up into the top-20 in the second mile of the race. Together those five totaled 67 points, which was fewer than projected, and took second place behind Fossil Ridge High School who are currently ranked #16 in the nation.

The Girls Team display of depth was even more emphatic than the boys – in fact, any combination for the nine East Angel finishers would have produced a score low enough to have qualified for the State Meet. Sophomore Lola Carhart trailed Chomas by just 4 seconds in 20:02 for 22^nd, ninth-grader Lila Brown ran a personal best 20:18 for 25^th place, junior Mary Clare Nussbaum was 27^th in 20:23, and ninth-grader Paola Ochoa finished in 21:06 for 37^th. All of the girls but for Mucharsky had run this course at the beginning of the season, and while the conditions were not identical, the girls posted improvements of anywhere from 50 seconds to 3 minutes on the same course since the beginning of the season.  

The East Angel Girls and Boys will conclude the Colorado High School Cross Country season on Saturday, November 2^nd, at the Norris Penrose Event Center. The 5A Girls State Championship race is at 12:20pm and the Boys at 1:40pm – more information will follow on the website. We are also happy to report that our DPS friends at Northfield qualified both their boys and girls teams for State, and Denver South qualified their boys. We are near certain this is a new record for DPS schools qualifying at the 5A level in the current championship format. Our league is strong.