Cross country stunned at CIF Finals

Story by Amber Chen
Staff Writer

Photo by Colin Grace
Contributor

Cross country struggled at the CIF Division IV Southern Section (SS) Championships on Saturday, Nov. 23. Both teams will not advance to State competition, missing the seventh place cutoff; the girls placed 11th and the boys placed 13th.

The boys and the girls team, ranked in the top five and ten in the SS, respectively, were favorites to move on to State prior to the meet. However, the Tigers fell short of expectations across the board.

“Nobody is sure [why we performed the way we did]. It was just a bad day all around. The odd thing is that I’m certain if we were to race next week, we’d do significantly better, but today we just didn’t have it,” senior Sam Clark said. “It’s the classic story where you win some and you lose some. And we just failed at the wrong place.”

For the boys team, senior Sam Clark placed 35th with a time of 16:13.8. Juniors Patrick Latting (41), Andrew Villapadua (46), and Andrew Parkinson (76) completed the race with respective times of 16:19.3, 16:24.0, and 16:44.3.

A sophomore trio rounded out the boys team. In 97th place, sophomore Brady Nakamura finished in 16:59.2. Sophomore Liam de Villa earned 114th place with a time of 17:14.8, and sophomore David Zhang had a time of 18:00.5 in 148th place.

Sophomore Sydney Morrow placed an impressive sixth with a time of 18:09.1, while fellow sophomore Mai Koyama (47) and junior Lindsay Michels (57) finished in 19:31.0 and 19:41.4, respectively. In 92nd, sophomore Kerrigan Riley ran the course in 20:30.3.

Junior Amelia Jarolim (101) completed the race in 20:45.2 and sophomore Lilian Zhu (132) ran a time of 21:22.0. Senior Amber Gonzalez-Pacheco rounded out the team in 149th place at 21:56.6.

With her sixth place finish, Morrow will advance to State individually, but the CIF elimination ends the teams’ season early. Still, the boys and girls placed first and second in the Rio Hondo League, respectively, and will continue to loom large as an RHL powerhouse in the future. Almost every varsity runner will return and look to lead South Pas back to State next season.

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