"The girls had the bounceback performance that we were looking for coming off of our performance at the conference meet.  We spent the past week rebuilding our confidence so that we could come into the meet and feel like we could win it and head back to the state meet.  I am very pleased with the effort and mental toughness they showed today.

Junior Paityn Noe won the championship with a dominating performance in beating the second place runner by 1 minute and 15 seconds.  She ran a controlled race and never looked back.  Sophomore Ava Vance continued to show steady progress heading into the state meet placing 5th.  Freshman Annika Larson ran her most complete meet of the season finishing 15th.  Those 3, in placing in the top 15 overall, qualified individually for the state meet.  Next came a breakthrough performance by Freshman Ava Richardson, in her first year of running cross country, finished in the 17th spot with an amazing race.  Seniors Kate Huisinga and Brooke Loewe ran solid races finishing in 23rd and 25th overall.  Raegan Loewe made her varsity debut, finishing 49th with a good effort.

We knew coming into the meet that positioning was going to be important.  There were 5 ranked teams, all in the top 14 in the state who were going to divide up a lot of the points.  Having Paityn and Ava V. running well heading into the meet gave us one of the best 1-2 punches, so we emphasized to the pack behind them that we needed to mix in with most of the other ranked teams 2-3-4 & 5 to get the win.  They responded and that gave us our 5th straight SQM championship, 8th straight state appearance and 18th overall."