CIF Prelims: Well, that was pretty good…

The Tartan boys and Lauren Justus stepped to line favored to advance, and advance they did.  On easily the best day of Glendora XC history, the boys advanced with the top time of the day in Div 2 and Lauren easily moved on.  Eight of our nine runner’s PR’d, and the guys set a GHS Mt.Sac team record by almost 1:40.

Lauren advanced as an individual, so she stood alone on the line without teamamtes, and was nearly alone at the end.  She ran a controlled, tactical effort to finish third in her heat in a PR 18:11, the tenth best time among the Div. 2 girls.  Her time moves her from the 3rd to 2nd on the GHS All-Time Performers list on the Mt.Sac course.

The guys went to the line rated 3rd in Div. 2, and so we were the top team seed in our heat.  The guys lived up to their ranking by winning the heat with only 36 points (and 3 minute and 54 point gap to the second team), with a combined team time of 78:43.  This broke our team Mt.Sac record set at the Invite, and was the fastest Div. 2 of the the day by almost a minute, and was the sixth fastest combining all the divisions.

The Tartans were led by a breakthrough performance from junior Anthony Castro.  Anthony won the heat in a huge 15:17 PR.  Third fastest Div. 2 runner on the day, he missed Thomas Finnigan‘s (’08) school record by 1 second.  We placed an amazing four runners in the top 7, with a 5-6-7 finish from Kelly Hernandez, Austin Goodheart, and Austin Mendoza, all in PR’s.  Shin Yamamura closed the door with a 16:17 PR for 19th place.  Off of these results, Anthony is now 2nd best GHS A-T at MtSac, Kelly is 4th, Austin G. is 6th, Austin M. is 7th best, and Shin is just outside the top 15.  Wow.

This was a great day for our team, and the boys team advances to the CIF finals for the first time.  While the guys will be favored to win and Lauren to advance, these results only get us to the starting line.

Next Saturday, we’ll need an even better set of efforts to get us to where we want to be at the finish line.

Glendora results here, complete results are here, and the split sheet is here: 11-14-09-cif-prelims.pdf