The Eagle boys track team headed to the Ballard Golf & Country Club last Monday, September 12, for the Ballard Invitational Cross Country Meet in an afternoon matchup Coach Ben Demuth said was like "a miniature state meet, based on the number of quality teams and individuals that we run against."
The Eagles came up with a seventh place finish, scoring 215, with Woodward Granger just ahead of them at 212, and Madrid with 231. In the top three were Des Moines Christian with 33, Gilbert with 42, and Solon with 80. Atlantic and Nevada rounded out the top five with 127 and 128 respectively. While Humboldt, Roland Story, and Iowa Falls filled out the bottom three with 238, 255, 270 in that order. And Nodaway valley came away with no team score.
Photo by Rick Dawson
"We were also without our number two runner in Noah(Thul)," said DeMuth, "and although our guys did everything they could to make up the difference we still were outside of the top half of teams in our class.
"I thought that our guys were a little in awe of all the highly ranked teams in this meet," DeMuth added, "as there were multiple top ranked teams in 2/3A that we were competing with. Including a ranked team in 1A Madrid that we beat in the team score."
Photo by Rick Dawson.
The Eagles individual scores were led by Drake Weland in 26, who Coach DeMuth said "was not at 100% but gave us a great run." Behind him were Zabdi Castro at 39, Dylan Beck at 41, Zach Hogrefe at 54, Felix Gonzalez with 55, Dustin Dawson hitting 57, and Alex Gaspar at 69.
"We did have 5 guys run their season best time," DeMuth noted,"with three of them being JV guys. Patrick did a great job leading the way for JV finishers followed by some excellent efforts out of Evan Cooper, Felix Reyes, and Brandon Crail – who had one of his best runs on this course in his career."
