THE FRONT ROW WITH JASON ELLIOTT: Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2015
Chances are, they could run the state high school cross country meet again this weekend and it wouldn’t finish any differently.
Whether it was the wet weather, young teams from the north or just really good teams from the south, it pretty much played out how it was expected to.
Well, unless you could have imagined a delay because of malfunctioning camera almost pushing the final races to be finished in the twilight.
WHILE NOBODY from District I was able to win a state championship on Saturday at Farragut State Park, it was going to take a really special day to do so.
Coeur d’Alene’s girls, winner of three straight state titles from 2012-14, finished ninth with only one returning scorer from those teams in junior Caitlin Conway. Both senior Carmen Duffy and sophomore Merceydes Smith competed at Eagle Island State Park in Eagle in 2014, when the Vikings won for the third straight year.
They’ll return all but Duffy next fall.
“Next year is next year,” Compton said. “When we’ve got things like this, and they probably don’t think they performed well, it just fires them up more. We’ll regroup in club and get things figured out and get back on track.”
The Nike Northwest regional cross country meet is Nov. 14 at Eagle Island State Park.
Saturday’s race was a reunion of sorts for the Vikings, who had a few of those runners from previous championship teams come back to be with the team for the state meet.
“I love it,” said Compton, who saw Josie Brown (Washington State) and Kara Story (Idaho) at Farragut to cheer on the team. “It says a lot about these girls and what they’ve done with this program. It’s neat that they come back and help us.”
THE CLOSEST any team came — in any classification — to a state championship from the north was the Coeur d’Alene Charter boys.
Charter had finished in the middle of the pack in bigger events this season — 10th at the Super One Invitational on Sept. 19 at Hayden Canyon and 14th at the Farragut Invitational on Sept 12 before turning things around to advance to state.
“They’ve been running really well the second half of the season,” Coeur d’Alene Charter coach Jim McPhilomy said.
“At the beginning of the season, we didn’t think we had a shot at anything,” said Coeur d’Alene Charter senior Michael Graves, who finished third overall in the 2A boys race. “The way everyone performed, we’re glad we got something.”
Any other time, teams from the north might have had to get on a bus to travel to a race the night before. This time, everyone came to them.”
“We were a little excited to race today,” Graves said. “First off, we were a little sad because we didn’t get to travel. But we got to sleep in this morning and come to a course that we knew really well.”
AFTER RUNNING the same course the previous week in near-perfect conditions, had that happened again on Saturday, there’s a fair chance that the kids from the north might have had a bit of an advantage.
Instead, with the rain and mud, the course was just as bad for all the participants, and even worse as the day went on.
For everyone.
Jason Elliott is a sports writer for the Coeur d’Alene Press. He can be reached by telephone at 664-8176, Ext. 2020 or via email at jelliott@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JEPressSports.