On Nov. 9, North’s cross country athletes ran a three-mile course at the state finals, culminating the 2024 season. Sophomores Sam Hill, Julia Rodney and Gwen Hobson earned the opportunity to compete at Detweiller Park in Peoria. Hill finished 41st in the boys race, Rodney finished 33rd amongst all girls and Hobson finished the girls race in 90th.
During the regular season, practices followed a set weekly schedule.
“We had the same practice schedule every week with long runs on Monday, workouts on Tuesday and Thursday, a medium-length base run on Wednesdays, and an easy pre-meet run every Friday morning,” said Rodney.
Boys coach Kevin Harrington and girls coach Shari Hayes led workouts focused on increasing intensity over time.
“[It’s] kind of the classic ideas. You’re building up mileage and you’re building your endurance and you’re building your speed,” said Harrington.
Harrington considered teammates an important part of running.
“When you’re running, when you have teammates to rely on and teammates to chase and teammates to lead and teammates to run with, that makes it so much better than just running on your own and that was one of our huge strengths,” said Harrington.
He also stressed the importance of consistency.
“Their consistency was huge. You can’t be a great runner if you’re not consistent. So it’s doing the work even when no one’s watching, so those things are huge,” said Harrington.
Once the postseason approached, the team had to make it through a regional and a sectional in order to make it to state. According to Hayes, qualifying for the sectional required the school to be one of the top five teams at the regional, and qualifying for state required the school to be one of the top seven teams at the sectional.
“The girls did really well. We qualified out of the regional, as a team, to the sectional, and at the sectional we actually had some outstanding performances. Four of the seven [set a personal record]. So that means they ran their personal best at that meet, [and two runners] ran a minute faster at sectionals than they did any other time of the rest of the year, and we almost made it to the state meet as a team,” said Hayes.
The boys team had a similar performance, but according to Harrington, fell just short of qualifying as a team. However, students were still able to qualify individually. The top ten individual runners who were not on a qualifying team earned a trip to state. Hill, Hobson and Rodney all advanced at sectionals.
At state, before the starting gun was fired, the runners kept confident mindsets.
“I felt ready to PR and confident that my team was going to do good, and I felt like I was going to have a good placement and race good,” said Hill.
Rodney, looking to have a strong finish to the season, had a similar attitude.
“I was extremely excited. I was so ready to show what I had been working for all season,” said Rodney.
After crossing the finish line, Hill’s time of 14:47.50 set a personal record.
“I felt pretty good because I finally went under 15 minutes and I PRed by 20 seconds,” said Hill.
Rodney wasn’t able to do the same with a time of 17:36.30, but still gained a lot of experience.
“Afterward, I was a little disappointed with my overall placement and the fact that I didn’t PR, but it’s okay because I gained a lot of experience from running at the level,” said Rodney.
After the season, Harrington met with his team and started setting future goals.
“So we kind of set some targets for next year, and when we set those targets, those are the things that we want to get done. How far we want to go at state, how fast we want to run, and then once you set those targets you can actually build some goals around what you’re going to do,” said Harrington.
Hayes’ group also overcame obstacles this season.
“We had some injuries and illnesses that took out our third and our fourth runner,” said Hayes.
The youth of her group was one of its biggest strengths.
“The two [girls] that went to state were sophomores and then I had a junior that was on my top seven and two seniors. So we have almost all our returning athletes for next year,” said Hayes.
For Harrington’s team, it was very similar.
“One nice thing is we’re a very young team, out of our top seven runners, we only had two seniors. So we had three sophomores and two juniors so that’s a good sign for the future,” said Harrington.
