This year’s cross country team spent countless hours running early in the morning through rain and shine. The team woke up early and slept on the bus awaiting their destination at the meet. The long days paid off as they finished the season with a district championship.

“ I’ve been running Cross Country for three years and this is really my first wet race and I’m really looking forward to it,” Junior Hosman Aguirre said.

“The course is really different, but the weather is great is great, there’s no sun, it’s cool, outside so I’d think it would be great” Junior April Ramos said.

Also through the years the team has grew very large, almost over 100 people within the Cross Country team, I asked what were their thoughts on having a large team, and this is what some said about the growing cross country team.

“I think we can get better,” junior Athziri Guerrero said.

 “ I feel like we’re close, a family basically, and we can push each other to become much better,” junior Zinnia Rivera said

As for non Cross Country runners, people would often ask, what do they do on a daily biases for practice and is it easy to do what they do.

“ We put in work the whole time, there’s no off or break, no walking, and we continue to get better,” sophomore Jonathan Torrez said

As for others some have come from different sports, asked what would be different from those sports they’ve previously played and differing from Cross Country. Some have came from soccer, but both do include running and asked how they felt when they started running Cross Country and what was differing from the two.

 “I definitely think Cross Country is a challenge mentally, you’re not tough then you probably won’t survive,” Junior Desiree Esquivel said.

Transitioning from soccer to cross country as those on the team do most of the time presents challenges at time.

“Cross Country is tougher because soccer fields usually have low grass and no hills,”  Guerrero said.  “Which made things easier for us.”

The team is in its second full year under head coach Leisa Reed and has changed from a team of 25 to more than 60 runners. 

“Managing that many number of kids makes a big difference, but personality wise the top two or three kids are very serious,” Reed said.  “We’re very young, we’ve lost 22 seniors last year, they probably had some leadership and some maturity to them that we are lacking right now.”