BELLBROOK — A mid-week cross country meet in some hot and muggy conditions provided plenty of challenges for each team at Tuesday’s annual Iris and Rick Black cross country meet, held on the Bellbrook High School grounds.
Using a team primarily of its junior varsity runners, Carroll High claimed the boys and girls individual wins. The boys team won the team crown, while the Patriots girls placed third out of six teams.
In the evening’s first event, Carroll sophomore Sarah Ochs won the girls 3-kilometer event with a time of 22 minutes, 29.2 seconds, with Fairborn sophomore Natalie Oktavec placing second (24:02.3) and host Bellbrook’s freshman Fiona Lin placing third in 24:04.3. Fifty one runners, representing host Bellbrook, Carroll, Fairborn, Miami Valley, Hamilton and West Carrollton competed in the girls event.
Fairborn won the girls team title, with a team score of 32, followed by Bellbrook at 36 points and Carroll with 57. Miami Valley, Hamilton and West Carrollton did not have enough runners to be officially scored in the girls team competition.
“I think they ran well. This was a harder course than they were use to, and there’s a lot of kids on this team where this is their very first season running, so we’ve been on a lot of flat courses previously,” Fairborn coach Allie Roberts said. “This one was more challenging, but I think since it was more challenging, they enjoyed it better.”
Carroll soph Adam Cross later completed the Patriots’ individual win sweep by claiming the boys 5-kilometer race win in a time of 19 minutes, 3.8 seconds. West Carrollton’s Lucas Eisele was second in 19:14.3, and Carroll’s Michael Duckro finished third in 19:27.9.
Fifty nine runners were listed in the boys race with Carroll scoring 27 points to win the team crown, followed by Fairborn (49 points), Bellbrook (73), West Carrollton (92) and Miami Valley (137). Hamilton was not scored.
Patriots coach John Agnew ran mostly junior varsity runners, and appreciated their performance.
“I’m really proud of all of our guys. They did great job in the heat, and they ran hard against a competitive field,” Agnew said. “We had the individual winners today in both races, so that was nice to see. It’s not every day that you have an opportunity to win a race.”
Carroll kept most all of its varsity rosters in a training rotation that has them primed and ready to run on Saturday Sept. 14 at the Friendship Invitational cross country meet, which is being held at Cedarville University. Bellbrook did the same thing and ran mostly junior varsity runners for Tuesday’s meet.
“Yesterday, our varsity kids had a pretty hard workout, today they ran a moderate workout. We’ll go back at a hard workout on Wednesday or Thursday, and then be ready and rested for Cedarville this weekend,” Bellbrook boys coach Mike Baumer said. “…The teams are both doing very well right now, and we’re excited that we’ve got a couple guys who are running in the low 16s (minutes), now we’ve just got to get a pack of runners to move up and help them out some.”