Girl's Cross Country: Knights Perform in Measuring Stick Meet

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

It wasn’t the Middletown High School Knights Girl’s Cross Country team’s best performance of the season but on a warm September day at an early-season meet, it was just good enough.

And, in this short season for Middletown the Knights would post their best meet of the season coming in sixth place out of fourteen teams at the Rebel Invitational at South Hagerstown High School on Saturday September 10^th.

It was an important meet for Middletown as out of the fourteen teams participating, five of the other thirteen teams are either in Frederick County or were in the Knights’ region for playoffs and Middletown would do well in what was essentially a mini playoff preview.

Middletown would put all their runners in the upper half of the standings and would no runner finish below 49^th place as Middletown had their best all-around team showing of the year.

Leading the pack again for Middletown was Knights senior Reilly Caldwell who delivered a solid meet in the aggressive heat as she came in fourth place posting a time of 20:31.40.

That time was not her best time on a three mile course but based on the conditions was impressive as all of the runners had to fight with an unusual mid-September heat wave.

It was a solid all-around performance for the Knights as well as following closely behind Caldwell was Marilyn Fisher who finished in 27^th, senior Molly Greenblat who finished in 33^rd, freshman Annushka Aliev who finished in 40^th, sophomore Nastassia Kaleta who finished in 49^th.

Middletown would take advantage of what was a grouped together main field as the difference between 12^th place and 56^th place was only three minutes difference and the Knights would manage to finish at the top of that peloton of runners which helped the Knights get the team finish that they did.

Similar to the boy’s race the heat would take a toll on all of the runners as even with a layer of cloud cover which made the heat a little bit more manageable it was still tough sledding for all the runners as the amount of heat made it very difficult for any team to get a good feel for how the runners would perform on a course like this.

Middletown will look to use their performance to provide a spark to the season as on a flat course with a small field the Knights performed well but in a large field Middletown has really not been tested yet.

Still for Middletown it was a positive meet as the Knights found a good spot to measure up to the opponents they’ll see the most.