Green Hope Cross Country

Twenty boys traveled to Ivey Redmon Park in Kernersville on September 8th for the Friday Night Lights Invitational. It was the first big race of the year for the top 6 boys and the second for the rest of the boys after a nice showing at the Providence Invitational.

The boys JV squad dominated at the Providence Invitational and looked to take home another win Friday. The team got off to a nice start and, by the halfway mark, it was obviously a two team race for first with the Falcons and Panther Creek battling it out. While PC took it out hard, the GH boys went out a little more conservatively and picked up the pace to ultimately take home another convincing win as they crushed the field of 43 teams scoring a very low team score of 18 points (to 74 points for runner-up Panther Creek). Junior Michael Biddle took home the individual title, running 17:24 to edge out senior Luke Bakley (also 17:24) who ran a very strong second half of the race coming from way back to challenge for the title. Other scoring runners were Michael Taylor (17:29), Liam McBride (17:34), and Andy Dawson (17:39).

There was a lot of anticipation for the varsity race as the boys were eager to take the course for the first time. Friday Night Lights is a chance for teams to run on the state meet course and do so under the lights with cooler temperatures. The Falcons went into this race with a plan to run fast, but not put in an all-out, high-level race effort. The top six or so Falcons were shooting for the 16:15 range. Often times race plans fall apart once the race begins, but on Friday the boys executed to perfection. Ryan Kemper slightly broke away from the pack as he finished in 6th place (16:04), but the next 6 runners finished within 1 second of each other (Peyton Barish, Finn McBride, Ares Epps, Reed Blackman, Ian Delgado, and Daniel Vo -- all 16:14!) with 10th grader Thomas Vo finishing 5 seconds behind in a PR of 16:19 and junior Spencer Cowley running a PR of 16:39. It was a very impressive early season performance. The team cruised to the team title with 51 points (over a field of 34 teams). The GH boys now tries to refocus for next week’s huge Oatlands Invitational in Leesburg, Virginia.