Opening Week in Review

Alan Versaw

Note: If anyone cares to submit a high-quality digital image from this past week's action, I'd be more than happy to credit the work and make it the cover photo for this article.

 

For those of you just learning what MileSplit Utah is all about, allow me to take a moment to explain. At MileSplit we cover the sports of high school cross country and track and field. We cover them on a statewide basis at a depth that has never before been done. We expect you, the audience, to hold us to a high standard.

This article is an example of the kind of coverage we want you to look for every time you drop in on the site. In this "Week in Review" article, we take a quick tour of all the meets from the preceding week for which we have received results. We look at the results and attempt to assess the meaning of those results. We endeavor to do that in a lively and engaging fashion.

How do we get the results we review? To the extent possible, I send out e-mail requests to coaches at the host schools for each meet in the days leading up to the meet and make a request for an electronic copy of the results from the meet when they are ready. Sometimes I get help from other sources: parents, other coaches, athletes, or simply fans of the sport who want to see cross country (and track and field) getting something like the kind of media exposure devoted to sports like football and basketball. As soon as I receive those results, I work on posting the results. Sometimes, it's possible to post the results directly. More frequently, the results must be reformatted a little before posting. If there's a lag time between receipt of results and posting, it is almost always a matter of reformatting.

It's understood that, in many cases, there's a reluctance to send out results to a newer presence like MileSplit Utah. We get that at MileSplit, but we'll also work very hard to earn your trust. In the meanwhile, we will endeavor to make your job easier. One way we make your job easier is to make all of your team's results available, and easily analyzed, from your team page. We also endeavor to make your job easier by providing free state-of-the-art cross country meet management software so that the process of scoring a meet is easier and more accurate than it ever was before.

Since taking over this site in January (with only limited time available to devote to it in the spring), I've learned that there's a wide audience in this state for the sort of things we can help you do on MileSplit. Utah is, on the whole, a very technologically savvy state. Many of you are already using the tools we make available, and we appreciate that.

With all that as prologue, let's dive into the results we have from last week's meets:

 

Premier Cross Country Invitational

The folks at Stansbury High School pointed the way to Settlement Canyon, and a large crowd followed them there to have a cross country meet. What we don't know yet is what the exact race distance was, but we're treating it as a three-miler for the time being. We do know that things ran fast on this course on Saturday. That state of affairs, however, isn't entirely unexpected on opening weekend. For most runners, a lot of pent-up adrenaline goes into the first race of the season.

In case anyone had let the names of Emily Rich and Jake Heslington slip from their consciousness over the summer, those names are safely back front and center now as the owners of the fastest times of the day.

Teamwise, Bingham easily dispatched the assembled 5A competition. Had Timpanogos (running their second meet in three days, by the way) been running in 5A instead of 4A, the team outcomes would have been a good deal closer but likely still would have fallen in Bingham's direction.

Homestanding Stansbury cleaned up in a serious way in the 1A-2A-3A boys race with a 1-3-6-7-11 score for a total of 28 points. It's early, but that's still enough to mark them as a team of concern in 3A. The 15:12 recorded for Austin Slade is a remarkable time and remains so even if the course was a little on the side of short. Stansbury was equally dominant on the girls' side, scoring 1-3-4-6-9 for 23 points. Morgan Vorwaller made it two-for-two for the Stallions on individual titles.

Girls Highlights

Boys Highlights

Utah Pre Region 8 Meet

To my knowledge, this meet opened the season for Utah, but I'm open to additional new information dispelling that myth :-).

Summer Harper has not lost a step, though perhaps some of the other girls in the field may have wished she had. A gap of over one-and-a-half minutes has a way of standing out, but it's not the first time Harper has stood out. And, it's worth noting that Orem got the best of the Timpanogos girls when both teams were fresh. We'll see if that relationship between the two teams holds through the remainder of the season.

As hinted earlier, Jake Heslington got the first of his two meet titles for the week at this meet. The team title, however, tilted in the direction of a very good Mountain View team, led by Jaydn Asay in second. With their first four through the chute in a 5K race in 16:44 or better, Mountain View looks like a solid 4A contender for the fall. There's some closing of the gap to be done between 4 and 5, but there is plenty of time to get that accomplished if everyone stays healthy. It's also worth noting that Alex Brown does not show in the results for Mountain View from this meet.

Remarkably, eight boys finished the course in less than 16:30, even with the absence of Brown. The kind of performances witnessed this past spring in the 3200 are apparently going to be visiting the cross country courses this fall as well.

Meet Results

Girls Highlights

Boys Highlights