ROUND ROCK – For the fifth year in a row, the Boerne Champion girls cross country team has returned from the state cross country meet with a state medal.
And what’s impressive about the five-year streak is that they’ve never earned less than silver medals.
The Lady Chargers finished second at last Saturday’s 5A state cross country meet at Old Settler’s Park in Round Rock.
During the five-year run, they earned silver, gold, gold, silver and silver.
Champion head cross country coach Jonathan Tate said a lot of people have played a role in the impressive streak.
“I’m proud of that, when you can do it for that long you have to have multiple groups of girls that have contributed to it,” he said. “We’ve had some cornerstones that left us, but we’ve had other people come in and continue it and not really drop off at all.”
While the Champion boys didn’t return home with state medals, they finished their 2022 season with a surprising seventh-place finish.
“It’s a big deal for them to get seventh when we were never ranked in the top 10 in the state all year,” Tate said. “At the end, even (on Saturday), we continued to beat teams that had beaten us earlier in the year.”
Varsity Girls
Champion scored 85 points for second to finish behind Lucas Lovejoy that ran away with the title after scoring 28 points. Lovejoy’s top five runners were all in the top 10 after they went 3-4-6-7-8.
College Station finished third with 91 points, three points behind the Lady Chargers to bag bronze.
Freshman Elizabeth Leachman paced the Chargers after she was 13th in a time of 19:06.7, sophomore Kynley Albright finished 15th in 19:11.5, senior Josey Whitaker was one spot back in 16th in 19:14, senior Grace Flores placed 18th in 19:19.3 and freshman Kendall Fallon came in 23rd with a time of 19:30.1.
Freshman Jenna Koepke clocked in at 20.03.7 for 47th and senior Erin Shrader posted a time of 20:51.5 for 74th to round out the team.
Tate didn’t want to make any predictions about next year but said they want to continue the steak and try to medal six years in a row.
“We’re not surrendering our podium spot without a fight. We’ll be going for it; I feel pretty good with who we have and who we’ll be getting from the middle school,” he said. “It’s exciting on the both the girls and boys sides.”
Varsity Boys
Champion finished with 199 points for seventh, behind first-place Grapevine (56), second-place Lucas Lovejoy (108) and third-place Frisco Reedy (151).
Friendswood was fourth (157), Georgetown fifth (167) and Frisco Wakeland sixth (198), just one point ahead of the Chargers.
Sophomore Luis Tovar led the Champion boys team after he placed 25th with a time of 16:40.1, sophomore
This is the Chargers story that appeared in the Wednesday online edition but the staff at the Star also wanted it to run in the weekend print edition so readers can clip it out and save it in scrapbooks.
Caleb Dehart finished 33rd after recording a 16:53.9, junior Benjamin Matamoros ran the race in a time of 17:03 for 43rd, sophomore Charlie Houck posted a time of 17:08.8 for 47th and junior Matthew Duran came in 51st after clocking in at 17:10.08.
Junior Patrick Thornton completed the course in a time of 17:37.3 for 71st and junior Noah Perez rounded out the team with a time of 17:44.7 for 75th.
Tate said the boys team made a lot of progress this year.
“After the FEAST meet, I think we were like 14th at a local meet and that wasn’t good. We were wondering what we were going to do but we stayed optimistic,” he said. “The guys really worked, they’re young but they started getting better.”
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