Girls’ Cross Country Struggles Without Full Team

On Sept. 26, 2015, about half of the members of the girls’ varsity cross-country team traveled to Boston to participate in the Codfish Bowl, a cross-country meet that hosted a pool of talented college and high school teams.

At the end of the day, the girls’ from Tufts University claimed the title, but not without a fight from the young Phillips Exeter squad. Uppers Christine Hu and Yoshiko Lynch finished 6th and 9th, respectively, out of the 161 total people who participated in the race. Big Red finished 5th out of the 10 teams who raced, despite that the fact that many of the other athletes in the race came from experienced university teams.

A significant reason for the unusually lackluster performance by the team was that many Big Red runners didn’t attend the race. Because of Saturday classes, many members of the team could not miss a day of school to travel to the Codfish Bowl, which hurt the team’s chances of placing highly.

“I love seeing how well these preps are racing because there is always so much room for improvement when you’re a prep.”

“We were missing classes for this race, so a lot of teammates decided to stay on campus and attend class instead of racing,” upper Kelsey Detels said. “As a result, our team was smaller than usual, but everyone worked super hard to make up for peoples’ absences.”

In place of the missing runners, many of the new members stepped up, according to Lynch.

“What really stood out to me was how well some of our preps raced. Ashley Lin, the third place runner for Phillips Exeter in this race, went out hard and determined,” she said. “Hanna Pak and Grace Gray, our next two preps, finished very close to one another, both with amazing times.”

Many of Exeter’s athletes finished with impressive times, especially considering the race was mostly college athletes.

“I love seeing how well these preps are racing because there is always so much room for improvement when you’re a prep,” she said.

The entire team, preps included, still has a lot of long and hard practices in front of them to prepare for E/a. However, senior Annie Dunigan noted that the team has already made long strides.

“There’s still a lot that we can all improve on since it’s still so early in the season, but the improvements that most girls have made between last weekend's race at Choate and this weekend’s race at the Codfish Bowl have been astounding and lay the foundation for a very strong season,” she said.

Next week, for the first time this season, the team will race together. In the first race at Choate, the races were divided into veterans and novices, and in the Codfish Bowl, only half of the team attended. In their upcoming race against St. Paul’s, the entire girls’ team will run together.

“For the next race at Saint Paul's School, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the entire team does together,” Lynch said.