The team will be meeting at 4pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, at 3:30pm on Wednesdays and 2pm on Thursdays. Some practices will be senior/captain led. Workouts and changes in the schedule will be posted on Coach Kohuth’s office door.
2-mile Race
Runners going to NXR have usually run a 2-mile track race as part of their preparation. There is an opportunity to race in Niwot on Tuesday, November 12th. Athletes must enter themselves and arrange their own transportation. Information on entering is here: Niwot 2 mile.
Great job to everyone who hit the track today in the snow!
The bus to State Meet will leave at 9am. Teammates not racing may take the bus down to Colorado Springs to support the team; please let Coach Kohuth know if you would like to travel with the team.
Girls race at 12:20pm and Boys at 1:40pm. The races start and finish at the Norris Penrose Center. It looks like there will be near ideal conditions for spectating, so come down and support your Angels. Links to additional information below.
Please remember to use this spreadsheet to indicate your intention to compete in Arizona on November 23rd. Coach Kohuth will be doing entries next week. NXR intent.
The end-of-season celebration will be on Friday, November 15 at 6:00 pm at the Montview Presbyterian Church in Park Hill. 1980 Dahlia St, Denver, CO 80220
Join us for dinner, awards, and a celebratory end-of-season party.
Runners and their families and fans are invited. Each person who attends, inlcuding athletes, needs a ticket.
(You can also contribute to coaches gifts at the ticket purchase link)
Please buy your tickets no later than Nov 10. If cost feels like a barrier to coming, please see Coach Kohuth or text or email Jennifer (303-725-7900 or jareich424@gmail.com). We have scholarships available to make sure everyone can attend.
We look forward to celebrating this amazing season with you!
The end-of-season celebration will be on Friday, November 15 at 6:00 pm at the Montview Presbyterian Church in Park Hill. 1980 Dahlia St, Denver, CO 80220
Join us for dinner, awards, and a celebratory end-of-season party.
Runners and their families and fans are invited. Each person who attends, inlcuding athletes, needs a ticket.
(You can also contribute to coaches gifts at the ticket purchase link)
Please buy your tickets no later than Nov 10. If cost feels like a barrier to coming, please see Coach Kohuth or text or email Jennifer (303-725-7900 or jareich424@gmail.com). We have scholarships available to make sure everyone can attend.
All athletes who are not still competing (or are alternates to compete at State) need to return their uniforms on Friday October 25th (tomorrow)! Please drop off your uniform (clean or dirty) between 3:30pm and 4:30pm at the entrance to the track (facing East HS). Failure to return uniforms will result in a $100 charge. Thanks
State Meet Qualifier Bags
Congratulations East Boys and Girls for qualifying for State Championship! If you have a State Meet bag, bring it tomorrow to practice at 4:00pm, so it can be embroidered for 2024!
The Denver East Angels hosted the City League Championships on Wednesday at Denver City Park, and in all four races over the challenging course the Angels exceeded expectations.
back to back league titles
Based on performances from earlier in the season, the Angels were underdogs for the team titles in three of four team races and two of four individual races. East came away from the meet with two team titles and three individual titles, and in all four races East scored fewer points than would have been predicted by earlier performance – a great indication of how well nearly every Angel showed up for Championship Season.
Seniors
In the Boys JV race, Northfield High School was heavily favored and backed that up with a perfect 15-point score. But the East JV Boys got after it from the start and made the team from “Central Park” earn it. Juniors Jackson Gertge and Kyle Kojima gave no quarter in the first mile, and the two held on for 7th and 8th place in 18:35 and 18:38 respectively. Junior Mason Harper finished 11th in 19:00 and freshman Tre Even was 14th in 19:09, less than half a second back from the top freshman in the race. That gave the Angels four runners in the top-14, which was substantially better than anticipated. Sophomore Zach Smiles closed out the scoring for the Angels with his 26th place finish in 19:43, securing 2nd place for the Angels, one place better than 2023. Freshman Finley Knight was the next finisher for the Angels in 43rd, the 9th freshman overall in 20:56, junior Alexandros Mays was 45th, and freshman Weston Dodson (10th best freshman in the race) was 47th.
Nobody can remember the last time the East Angels JV Girls didn’t win the City League team title. Because it has never happened. Ever. That was the challenge given to the East JV Girls as they faced a Northfield team that was favored to beat the Angels 23-30 if seasonal best times were to be believed. From early in the first mile, Angel runner Ivy Parish set the pace up front, and while a single Northfield runner gamely hung on to try to make a race of it, Parish eventually pulled away for a comfortable 17 second margin of victory in 20:42. Angel junior Mary Clare Nussbaum, somewhat typically for her, made the biggest moves up through the top-10 finishers to secure 3rd place in 21:08. Ninth-graders Paola Ochoa and Ainslie Mohr also moved their way past Northfield runners in the middle mile and hung on for 5th and 6th place in 21:32 and 21:34. The Nighthawk girls would put the next eight runners across the line, but only the first five of them would count towards the team score, so when ninth grader Emma Maldonado-Ramos crossed the line in 22:54 in 15th place, she was scored as 12th place and the East Angels had secured another JV Girls team title, upsetting the Nighthawks 27-30. Sophomore Grey Jenson crossed the line in 23:57 for 26th place for the Angels as their 6th runner, and seniors Rae Tatel and Yelena Konowal ran 24:01 and 24:47 for 29th and 34th place.
The Northfield Boys Cross Country Team has earned the #5 ranking in Colorado 5A this season and came to the league meet not only heavily favored, but on paper looked like they could score as few as 20 points. However, recent history in the meet suggested that the East and South boys at least had a chance to make the race more competitive, and indeed, the race for the team title ended up being far more competitive. The first half of the race developed somewhat tactically, as a large group of boys including East senior Jonas Scudamore and junior Henry Bennet came through 2500m as a pack, with junior Isaiah Springer and senior Ben Brown not far behind. The race broke open between 3000m and 4000m, as the defending champion Scudamore steadily pulled away from the rest of the leaders to secure his second league title in 16:09. Bennett was able to grab 5th place in 16:35 from that lead group, while Springer moved up to 10th in 16:44 and Brown held on to 15th in 17:05. Sophomore Emery Wagner, running his first race in more than three weeks coming off a potluck related injury, ran a great 2nd half to take 21st in 17:24. Junior Abraham Morginsky finished 32nd in 18:23 and senior Toby Penner 39th in 19:02. As was the case last year, the Angels took third as a team, but this year the Angeles were far more competitive than anticipated and than they had been the year before, finishing with 51 points to Northfield’s 38 and South’s 44.
Times run at the Liberty Bell Invitational in mid-September indicated that the East Angel Girls Varsity (who unexplainably are no longer ranked in the top-10 in the State) were favored by just a single point over the Northfield Nighthawks. While the Nighthawks definitely field a really good team, the East coaches suspected that the Angels had made some favorable progress in the last month, and the results bore that out. Way, way out front, senior Rosie Mucharsky took a couple very swift victory laps on her own from the start to secure her 4th league title. Because Parks and Recreation has forced changes to the East home course, there are no previous meet records, but 17:40 on this challenging course is definitely really fast. Delivering arguably the biggest surprise of the meet, sophomore Corrine Kennedy confidently moved past one of the best runners in the league over the last few years near the end of the second mile to take second place in 19:15. Juniors Julieta Ochoa and Scout Chomas executed the race plan excellently to take 4th and 6th for the Angels in 19:43 and 20:02. Sophomore Lola Carhart rose to the challenge of getting past all other teams’ 5th best runner, racing into 9th place overall in 20:09, while her classmate Avery Johnson, coming off injury and a more than three week break from racing, ran tough in the second half of the race to take 11th in 20:16. Ninth grader Lila Brown, who was asked pre-race to stick with her “faster” teammates in the earlier part of the race even if it meant she would “blow-up” before the finish, did the former and not the latter, running a personal best on a course that does give these up easily, finishing in 20:18 for 13th place. It was an emphatic win for the Angels, scoring a mere 22 points, half as many as the next team, and with all seven runners finishing with 1st or 2nd Team All-City honors.
The East Angel Varsity teams will take this momentum into the 5A Region 4 Championships on Thursday at Spring Canyon Park in Fort Collins. The top-4 teams and top-15 individuals will move on the Colorado State Meet. The Boys race at 2pm and the Girls at 2:30pm. Find meet information including course map here.
Girls: Mucharsky, Kennedy, J. Ochoa, Chomas, Carhart, Johnson, Brown, Nussbaum, P. Ochoa
Unofficial bus information: Leaving at 12pm. Alternates training with the team and other team members in good academic standing can get excused from school to attend meet and take bus, space allowing, per Coach Kohuth’s discretion, to support the team. Official bus information will be announced at practice or speak with Coach Kohuth.
Regional Team dinner on Wednesday for those competing and all alternates continuing to train with the team – check with coaches for details.
Come in your full race uniform (top and bottoms) to City Park for photos at 4pm. You may do individual photos tomorrow too. Ordering information will be here as it becomes available.
Amazing job today at City League Championships! All four teams exceeded expectations and East came away with 2 team league titles and 3 individual league titles. Much more about all the teams will be posted in the recap later in the week. Congratulations to everyone who competed, and huge thanks to all our volunteers who spent a full afternoon on the course making this event possible. We always receive a lot of praise from DPS athletic department officials when we host meets, and this is only possible due to the generosity of so many parents and other supporters of our program. Thank-you!
About this time of year, we check-out what our East Angel alumni who are running at the collegiate level have been doing so far this season.
Starting in the northeast, Julia Schor, East Class of ’21 and now a senior at Amherst College, has had a terrific season thus far for the Mammoth. Most recently Schor took 24th of nearly 400 runners at the Paul Short Invitational in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, helping her team take first of 46 teams. She has run 22:01 for 6K this fall, and the undefeated Mammoth are currently ranked #5 in the entire nation in DIII.
If you are looking for Alligators in Pennsylvania, apparently you head to Allegheny College. Recent East grad and now Allegheny Gator Sophia Shiroff was most recently 68th of about 180 runners at the Ohio Wesleyan Invitational running 24:55 for 6K. The Gators took second in the meet and are currently ranked 7th in the Great Lakes Region for DIII.
Moving midwest, Grace Todd opened her collegiate career last week racing in the Open Division of the Pre-Nationals race in Terre Haute, Indiana. The Washington University Bear ran 24:13 for 6K to take 20th place. The Bears are currently ranked #14 in the country for NCAA DIII.
Also in Terre Haute last weekend was Lewis and Clark College sophomore Quinn Higgins. Higgins was 100th of over 300 runners in the Championship race in 26:08, where the Pioneers took 18th of 46 teams. Higgins posted a pr of 25:29 for 8K earlier in the season. The Pioneers are ranked 9th in the West Region of DIII.
In NCAA Division I action, Corbin Hobert, now a sophomore at UC San Diego, ran his first collegiate cross country races this year. He has put up an 8K best of 26:32 this season for the Tritons.
Dartmouth College graduate Will Daley is now a graduate transfer at #21 ranked University of Virginia; he has yet to race this season for the Cavaliers.
Denver East High XC 