M-ette Young captures 4th as Cross Country season begins

The M-ette Cross Country team boarded an early morning bus Saturday, and traveled to eastern Montana to participate in the first meet of the season. The meet would take place near the Medicine Bear Complex facility in Poplar. Despite a looming haze on the horizon caused by the wild fires burning all over the state, the light cloud cover and cool temperatures provided ideal conditions for running a 3 mile race.

The twenty seven girls representing eight teams walked the course prior to the race, and made their way over blacktop streets, rutty gravel roads, groomed prairie, rocky hills, cement sidewalks and mowed grass. This would be a true cross country course and a great first meet to gauge how conditioned the girls were at the early part of a ten week season. With only two weeks of training under their belts, they had to be ready to perform.

The group of girls gathered at the start line following the conclusion of the middle school boy’s race, and received last minute instructions and well wishes and nervously waited for the harsh sound of the starting gun to go off. And soon the race was underway and they would experience their first race of the season and for some, their first high school cross country meet.

The overall winner of the girl’s 3 mile race was Anna Buller of the Richey/Lambert Fusion team, running the course with a time of 20:55. Second place honors went to Frazer’s Sierra Summers who ran the course in 21:22. Andrea Hale of Poplar ran in to a third place finish with a time of 21:38. Freshman Leslie Young of Malta running her first ever cross country race, finished fourth with a time of 22:28.

The Poplar meet is a great confidence builder and shows you where you are in relation to competition at this point in the season and what you need to do to get stronger and keep improving throughout the rest of the season. Assistant Coach Fallon Handley and I were very pleased at how the girls performed at this first meet. These girls work hard at practices, are very coachable and a fun bunch of girls. We look forward to the next meet when we will have the full team in action, when we travel east to Wolf Point on Friday September 1.

The Mette Cross Country team finished as follows:

Name Place Time

1. Leslie Young 4th 22:28

2. Jillian O’Brien 9th 24:47

3. Danie Rhodes 13th 25:19

4. Taylor Gilkerson 16th 27:04

5. M. Williamson 17th 27:31

6. Kaycee Bond 21st 29:15

7. Reese Sjostrom 24th 29:28

8. Chloe Hunter 27th 41:59

Eight teams represented schools from Poplar, Frazer, Richey/Lambert, Circle, Fairview, Culbertson, Brockton and Malta.

The following are the team scores based on teams that fielded full teams for scoring:

Team Points

1. Poplar 41

2. Malta 59

3. Fairview96