Every year, when the new school year comes around and the leaves begin to fall, our runners embark on their journey on the trail. This year, “we are off to a great start,” said the Girls’ Head Coach Mr. Baird. Even though it is a relatively small cross country team this year, the runners are motivated and have made significant progress throughout scrimmages and daily training.
Boys Varsity Team Captain Arthur Illidge said, “The most exciting thing about this team is that we just came off of a big improvement in our team’s performances last year.” As the captain, he holds an important role in helping his teammates to push themselves and surpass their personal records. He said, “Running can sometimes seem like a very individual sport, but something we need to work on is staying together on runs and workouts and using each other to push ourselves harder and keep improving.”
Both Mr. Baird and Boys Varsity Coach Mr. Sokolnicki stated that their runners have more confidence and are exceeding their personal record as they realize that they can do more than they thought. Mr. Baird noted that, “Being a small group of runners, grouping became harder and harder. We are trying our best to arrange our runners with someone that they can run with at a similar pace.”
Last Saturday, on September 21st, our cross country boys team performed excellently in the Division 1 Canterbury Invitational and achieved 7th place out of the 12 teams. Johnson Ye, Class of 2026, got 12th place, the best time in the individual performance on the team.
Baird, Sokolnicki, and Illidge all expressed excitement for the season ahead. Arthur believes that the boys have the potential to do even better this year than last, as they have kept most of our varsity top 7. The Founders League Championship and the NEPSAC championship will be very important races for them later in the season, and he thinks they can compete for top 3 at both meets.
