Cross country teams race after canceled first meet

The cross country teams ran for their first major meet of the season on Oct. 11, after the first scheduled West Alameda County Conference (WACC) Center Meet was canceled due to problems in air quality.

Freshman Iliana Nierengarten and senior Lucas Chang led the varsity teams in the second WACC Center Meet, running at Hayward High School, placing second and tenth place for the girls and boys varsity teams respectively. The course was three miles long.

Chang, who is also captain of the boys varsity team, finished in tenth place, first of the school team, with 16 minutes and 9 seconds. 

“Definitely not a record-breaking meet. We’ve been working up to this meet the entire season so far; kind of hoping we would get a better result,” said Chang. “But it’s ok, I think we had pretty decent results all around.”

Senior Andrew Mitsuyoshi was second of the team to finish, placing 15th at 16:49, over a minute improvement from his previous personal record.

The boys varsity team was able to place third out of ten total schools, with the top five runners all placing above 25th place. 

In cross country races, the score is decided and organized by the sum of the placements of the top five runners in each team. 

Nierengarten finished second in the race, first of the girls varsity team, at 19:05. 

“Overall, it was pretty good. I just tried to stick with the top two girls, and take it from there,” Nierengarten said. “The first place got away from me a bit, but I’ll try to get it next time.”

Senior Alyssa Chen, captain of the girls varsity team, was second of the team to finish; at fourth place she finished at 19:27. 

“It was definitely really tough, but I think that the practices and the coaches and just the entire team definitely helped push me and the rest of the team to push through,” said Chen.

With the top five runners for the team placing in 20th place and above, the girls varsity team placed second out of eight total schools.

The boys and girls non-varsity teams were also able to achieve good results. Boys non-varsity got first place against the other nine schools, and girls non-varsity placed third out of six total schools. 

Senior Kai Emerson was the first of boys non-varsity to finish, placing third at 17:56. He was closely followed by freshman Benjamin Galli then sophomore Logan Chen, who both got 17:57. 

Girls non-varsity was led by senior Lauren Siopack, who placed fourth at 21:59 minutes. Juniors Braelyn Bolles and Jillian Taylor finished as second and third of the team, placing 11th with 23:32 and 12th with 23:34 respectively.

After the third WACC Center Meet on Oct. 18, where the cross country teams performed exceptionally well, the next major meet will be the WACC Cross Country Championships, taking place on Nov. 4 at Hayward High School.