Verona Invite - Varsity = 5th JV = 4th

Saturday brought an end to a great week of training for our 2012 squad. The kids have been working really hard day in and day out and I am excited to see big improvement throughout the year. The Verona Invite exposes us to the top teams in our conference (LaFollette, West, Craig, Middleton) and the top teams from our Sectional (West, Baraboo, Middleton) and lets us know where we stand for the season and what work we still need to accomplish. We've discussed this year that we need to be hungry to improve all season long and that means hard work during the week. We had a mixed bag of results with our times at Verona and I'm okay with this because I know how hard we have worked this week. Stay with what we are doing at practice and the times will drop for everyone throughout the season. As always, it is important to stay healthy and get our rest so all of the hard work can pay off on race day.

In the varsity race our team looked a little sluggish and paid the price for a slow first mile. We did not run our best and LaFollette and West took advantage of this to show their strength. We now know what they have and can start setting our sights on closing the gaps to their runners. We were in a very close battle with Janesville Craig (2 pts) and Baraboo (1 pt). Jonah led us on the course with a top ten finish in 8th place. Our gap from our #1 runner to #2 runner was down to :52 seconds and we would like to see this under :45 seconds. Sam B and Bryce H finished together in 27th and 28th. Our gap for our #1 to #5 was 1:10 and we need to get this under one minute...it seems like small things but had our #5 runner been 11 seconds faster our team score would have improved by 8 points (we missed out on 3rd place by 2 points) and this will become a bigger deal as the season moves on. Tyler M had a nice race as our #4 and James A held on to be our #5 runner after losing one shoe early in the race. Our varsity squad was rounded out with Ryan W and Connor G-T. We had hoped to have all varsity runners under 18:00 and we did not miss by much at this meet and hope to accomplish this by next week. I look forward to watching this group continue to grow and hope to see us improve and compete with the best teams in the area. We have big things to accomplish.

Our jv team is big (to say the least) our goal this year is put more of those jv guys in the top half of the race as we hope to have a really strong jv team this season. To accomplish this it is important that this group is competing for those varsity spots, earning varsity points, and looking to compete at every meet we go to this season. Our scoring 5 today were Hans H, Jacob R, Ben B, Mason R, and Connor K. These guys helped lead an onslaught of PRs in the jv race as every freshman improved upon their time from intrasquad and we had 31 total PRs. This goes to show that we are learning from our past races and becoming better racers of the 5k distance. Our top frosh on the day was Benton DD as he approached the 20 minute mark with his time of 20:27. I think the freshman group can make a big impact on our all-time list if they continue to work as hard as they have in the first three weeks all season long. Our top sophomore time today was Ben B as he approached the 19 minute mark and we hoping to see a bunch of sophomores break 18 minutes throughout the season.

Pictures from meet added to Picasa Album --> click on album in right column

VERONA RESULTS
Boys Varisty (Team and Individual)
Boys JV (Team and Individual)

UPCOMING EVENTS
NO PRACTICE MONDAY - Run 45 - 60 minutes On Your Own
September 8th - Team practice - 8:00am
September 9th - Ironman Volunteering
September 10th - Fall Sports Potluck - 6:00pm
September 12th - Athletic Code Meeting - ALL ATHLETES AND PARENTS - 7:00pm

NEXT COMPETITION
West Invite - September 6th (Thurs)
@ Yahara Cross County Course (The Dump)
4:00pm Boys JV Race
4:30pm Girls JV Race
5:00pm Boys Varsity Race
5:30pm Girls Varsity Race
6:15pm Awards Ceremony (Top 2 teams varsity, top 25 individuals varsity, top 20 individual jv)
(2011 West Invite Results - JV and Varsity)