It's exciting that two of the top five girls' teams in the country will meet at their own state championship. It's too bad #1 is in the same state and will face neither squad at the champs
Catching up with one of this fall's capriciously selected cross-country threads
Two weekends ago, the Niwot High School girls’ cross-country team—having been dropped from #1 to #2 in the nation by Milesplit after the blitz Air Academy of Colorado Springs unleashed at the Woodbridge Invitational in California on September 16—put on an arguably even more bruising display at the Desert Twilight XC Festival in Mesa, Arizona.
Niwot’s statement in Arizona compelled Milesplit to move the Cougars back to the top spot in its biweekly rankings, where Dyestat’s rankings have kept them all season. Meanwhile, Mountain Vista of Highlands Ranch sits at #4 nationwide in Milesplit’s poll and #5 in Dyestat’s.
The 2023 Colorado State Cross-Country Championships are in thirteen days at the Norris Penrose Events Center in Colorado Springs. Clearly, all three of these teams have aspirations extending far beyond the end of October. This has meant all three of these teams negotiating the basically meaningless in-state invitationals and league championships held since the last weekend in September without deploying all of their top runners. This fascinating scenario—coaches simply withholding their top runners from less-important races rather than having them cruise through these—was rare-to-nonexistent until maybe a decade ago.
On September 30, the day after Desert Twilight, Mountain Vista raced at the Pat Patten Invitational in Boulder and won easily with 19 points, compiling an 18:19 top-five average and landing 63 points ahead of second-place Boulder High School. On Thursday, the Golden Eagles prevailed with similar ease at the Continental League Championships, besting Castle View by 61 points (perhaps for want of a moat) in scoring only 17 themselves and assembling an 18:39 top-five average. While cross-country times don’t mean much anyway, all of these are compromised by 3 to 3.5 percent, or around 40 seconds, owing to various degrees of high altitude.
While it appears that Mountain Vista ran all of its varsity runners in both races, Niwot and Air Academy have not done the same over the past two weeks.
On October 5, Niwot traveled to the Warrior Lincoln Park Classic, doubling as a league championship, and withheld its top four runners. Despite this, the Cougars tallied only 18 points, with its top five averaging 18:08. Notably, on the boys’ side, Niwot, ranked #13 in the nation by Milesplit and #14 by Dyestat, employed the same basic strategy, benching its top three runners, and nearly lost as a result, edging Eagle Valley by three points (43 vs. 46) and dropping a slower top-five average (15:39 vs. 15:34). Even more notably on the boys’ side, Porter Middaugh of Battle Mountain ran 14:38 to win the race. While Grand Junction sits at “only” 4,600’, most experts would agree that this would be a decent sea-level time even on a slightly downhill track for a high-school kid.
One day later, Niwot, which apparently belongs to two different leagues or conferences, ran a junior-varsity squad at the Longs Peak League Championships, with that team claiming fourth place. The Cougars are idle until Thursday and the Colorado 4A Region 3 Championships in Arvada, the team’s last meet before the State Championships nine days later.
Air Academy, meanwhile, entered a vastly diminished squad at the Rampart Rams Invite on September 29, the same day Niwot was busy lambasting everyone at Desert Twilight. While that effort only produced a third place, the Kadets put on a far stronger display at their own invitational on October 6. At an altitude of around 7,000’ above sea level, Air Academy scored 16 points and threw down an 18:08 top-five average. Winner and Kadet Bethany Michalak’s 16:48 under these conditions is really something else. Michalak was already winning national titles as a 12-year-old, so it’s nice to see another girl with staying power (so far).
On Thursday, when Niwot will compete against other 4A schools, Mountain Vista will race at the Colorado 5A Region 2 Championships in Grand Junction, while Air Academy will compete at the Colorado 5A Region 5 Championships in Colorado Springs. Then these two schools will tussle for in-state, in-division championship honors at Norris Penrose while Niwot does whatever it does to its 4A foes in a different race on the same course on the same day.
I think Air Academy is a lot closer to Niwot than it is to Mountain Vista and will have no problem dispatching the Golden Eagles at the 5A State Championships. And ideally, all three schools will meet next month at the NXN Southwest Regional in Arizona, but even that isn’t assured given the different paths teams can take in the so-called postseason. Also, the altitude in Colorado Springs has a way of scuttling form charts despite all kids involved being used to the rarefied air, so Air Academy’s impending supremacy over Mountain Vista’s is far from assured.
Whatever these Colorado kids are breathing, they’re making the rest of the country and its syrupy atmospheric conditions look slow. I may have to travel to the State Championships myself to see how much of this is, like, even real.