The Southeast Valley cross country teams competed in the Lynx Invitational at Webster City on Monday, Aug. 29th. The meet featured 17 schools representing all sizes of schools from 1A through 4A.

   The boys varsity team finished 11th overall. Class 3A North Polk won the boys’ side of the meet with a perfect score of 15 points followed by 3A Algona with 84 points and Ballard with 88 points. On the girls’ side, the SV girls once again were short a runner and did not have a team score. Class 3A Ballard and North Polk went 1 - 2 in the team standings with 33 and 66 points respectively. Class 1A St. Edmond finished 3rd.

   Oscar Hanson was 14th and Cooper Nuss was 18th to lead the team once again. Their respective times of 17:58 and 18:26 were season bests. Spencer Suchan was the 3rd runner for the Jags, improving almost two minutes from the previous meet, running a 21:40 to finish 83rd.

Also running season bests were a pair of freshmen, Ethan Tucker (85th) and Lincoln Akins (88th) who finished the 5k in 21:43 and 21:52 respectively. Kyle Johnson (92nd, 22:13) and Drew Dorsey (111th, 25:15) were the Jaguar’s 6th and 7th runners in the varsity race. 

In the varsity girls race, four Jaguars finished the race. Sophomore Hailey Rees and Junior Alexis Peterson once again paced SV in season best times. Hailey (62nd) ran 28:54 and Alexis (70th) ran 32:28. Abbi Tucker finished the course in 34:53 (72nd) and Katie Field in 40:01 (77th).

Those attending saw Iowa State history made in the girls race as Paityn Noe of Ballard won the girls’ race in a time of 17:23 which is the all-time best 5k girls’ time in the state since the girls made the switch to 5k in 2015.

The boys’ also had a JV team compete in the meet on Monday night. All five of the JV runners ran season best times. Dreyvon Steadman (56th, 24:14), Jacob Snyder (76th, 25:25), Jamie Dalley (93rd, 27:06), Elias Field (109th, 31:07) and Ryan Stewart (110th, 32:38) made up the JV team that finished 12th in the team standings.

“This is an extremely tough meet for us competing against some of the bigger schools in the area, but getting used to competing against these schools seems to help us later in the season. The positive is we had 12 out of our 16 athletes improve their times from the Thursday before. We get a good week and a few days now before our next day, so we can get some quality work in to drop times at our next meet,” commented Coach Nuss.

The Jaguars will compete again on Saturday, September 10th at Jefferson and then again on Thursday, September 15th at Panorama.