Kahok girls cross country begins season

by Mark Jurgena

COLLINSVILLE — The Collinsville High School girls cross country team got their season underway on Aug. 31 at the Mascoutah Cross Country Kickoff at Mascoutah Middle School on a flat, but somewhat muddy three-mile course.

CHS was led by Catalina Jiminez-Magana with a time of 23:09.6 to take 42nd place out of 143 runners at the meet.

“I believe it’s just short of a PR (personal record) for her,” said Blair. “I think she was in the 22s last year.

“She’s been our fastest girl for three years now. She’s my fastest 800 and miler in track as well so the speed is there. I know in the summer she had other obligations and just wasn’t able to be consistent on some of the miles as we’d like her to be. But for her to come out and do that just shows that her experience is paying off and I would imagine that as the conditioning gets better it will get closer to that 20-minute mark that we’ve been trying to get to for the past couple of years.”

Danielle Cary took 64th place at 24:04.1 as was her teammate Clare Garike. The determining factor went down to a thousandth of a second according to Blair.

“Dani put in like 250 miles this summer, it was awesome,” Blair said. “To see that the results are finally coming around and she is seeing it as well. It’s only going to get better from here.

“Clare finished with a PR and it shows with her consistent summer training. I’m excited to see all the girls’ results from Granite City next week.”

Morgan Laing was 73rd place with a time of 24:34.8.

Team and Individual results

Vanessa Teel of Pinckneyville won the title in 19:18.7 over Breigh Desmond of Belleville (Althoff) who finished in 19:28.4.

Anna (Jonesboro) won the team race with 39 points while Mascoutah had 88 points for second place. Collinsville did not enter enough runners to place in the team standings.

Upcoming Schedule

Collinsville will compete at the Granite City Invitational at Wilson Park on Saturday.