The St. Louis boys and girls cross country teams competed hard to place in the top five in each of their small school race divisions at Shepherd, Sept. 4. Additionally, each of the teams also placed in the top ten at the Bath Invitational, Sept. 7, in the Class Two races.
On the day at Shepherd, the girl’s team ran into an impressive fourth place finish. Top runners for the girl’s team were Abby Dice with 21:38, Halle Hoyt with a personal record of 22:08, Sydney Dickman with a PR of 23:55, Lilly Mann with a 23:22, and Annah Hess with a time of 24:19.
On the boys’ side of things, top runners on the raceday were Landon Pestrue with an SR of 16:25, Colin Kuhn with a time of 18:11, Alex Rodriguez with 18:29, Hayden Shattuck running his first race this season clocking 18:47, and Jackson Schulz ran a 21:47.
Moving onto Bath, the girls placed 10th in the race, with top runners on the day being Dice running a season record 21:37, Hoyt with another PR on the week with 21:54, Dickman also ran another PR of 23:02, Mann clocking 23:10, and Hess with 25:17.
For the boys race at Bath, top five runners were Pestrue running 16:43, Kuhn rolling into 18:02, Rodriguez with 18:08, Shattuck clocking at 18:53, and Schulz running a 21:25. The boys team came in seventh overall.
Along with these races came early season outlooks; Coach Jay Puffpaff claimed, “Both teams continued to take steps in the right direction as we continued to make progress towards our end of the season goals.”
Coming back from a slight foot injury at the very start of the season, Shattuck stated, “First race coming back, it felt as you would expect. Obviously really sore, but my body is ready for the season.”
