Cross Country continues to climb to #1 in CIFs

Throughout the course of their 2016 season, the Samo cross country (XC) team paved a road to Samo history with both the boys and girls varsity teams advancing to CIF preliminaries, and the girls continuing to CIF finals. In addition to their success in CIF, the varsity team achieved second place in league and hope to set higher expectations for next season.According to XC runner Aamir Reyman (’19), their season started off very well with lots of runners hitting varsity times as well as freshmen and junior varsity (JV) runners making exceptional progress, achieving good times at their meets along with invitationals.“The freshmen and JV teams are also improving really well and are pushing varsity to run even faster,” Reyman said. “We just finished league and boys and girls varsity advanced to CIF preliminaries.”XC captain Stevie Navin (’17) agreed that ever since their season began in September, both the girls and boys have been looking very strong.Throughout the season, the team had done well at various meets and gone to invitationals such as Cool Breeze and Woodbridge. The goal for this season for both boys and girls was to win in league, but since they moved on to CIF preliminaries, their goal was to move on to CIF finals and even to the state meet.“We’ve always made it to preliminaries, but we’ve never made it beyond,” coach Tania Fischer said. “The boys placed second in league, whereas they placed third last year, and the JV teams dominated this season, which is a good sign for next year.”In addition to Fischer’s team goals, many runners have been doing well in achieving their own personal goals that they had set for themselves for this season.“I was really looking forward to this season because I didn’t have a good season last year and I wanted to improve and do well for the team this year. This being my senior year, I wanted to leave doing really well and doing a good job for my school,” Navin said. Just recently, both girls and boys placed second in league, with the girls team losing first place by a mere point. The second place loss was a heartbreaker to many XC runners especially since they had done so well and lost by so little. “We only lost by one point [in girls’ league], as compared to before, where El Segundo dominated in league, so I feel like that alone shows the amount of improvement,” Fischer said. “If you step back, you can really tell we’ve come a long way.”According to XC captain Anya Sturm (’17), girls XC competed in CIF finals this past weekend, Nov. 19-20, in Riverside, CA. Both preliminaries and finals were held in the same location, one week apart. In preliminaries, the girls team placed sixth in their race and made the top eight teams to qualify for finals. “At finals, the race was huge, around 200 people, and we got to race against some of the best teams in the nation,” Sturm said. “Since it was our first time there, there wasn’t as many expectations for the girls, we just wanted to race our best.”Though they came out 23rd in finals, they did a lot better than last year, making school history and will continue in the future to improve and achieve their goal of getting to state.Currently, runners are preparing for the transition from the XC season to the track season, following a successful, memorable and enjoyable XC season.