As Paint Branch High School’s Cross-Country Team made their way to Northwest High School’s bleachers, they prepared themselves for a challenging race against one of the top teams in the state. Knowing what they were up against, the team planned their race strategy and set out to walk the course, upon which they would have to put everything they had in order to be successful.

On Tuesday, September 20th, the Paint Branch Cross-Country Team traveled to Northwest High School for their second divisional meet of the season against perennial power Northwest and a challenging Einstein High School squad. The athletes left school around 12:45 PM by bus and came back satisfied around 5:00 PM. Although Northwest won against both schools, PB’s girls conquered Einstein’s girls with a whopping 20-point difference.

Cross-Country assigns points based on each runners’ finishing place, and whichever team receives the least number of points wins. In the case of this tri-meet, the winning team would have the least number of points, and the third finishing team would have the most. The girls’ races ended with PB scoring 16 points to Einstein’s 39, and 40 to Northwest’s 20. Paint Branch’s boys’ team  finished with 45 points to Northwest’s 15, and 31 points to Einstein’s 26. This set both the boys’ and girls’ overall records to 1-2 for the season.

According to junior runner Zuri Rashad, facing Northwest’s team, one of Paint Branch’s biggest competitors, would make the meet particularly difficult. The team excels in terms of execution of race strategies, like packing together to ensure no athlete from opposing teams can move forward, as well as fighting their way to the front. Although Einstein would be less of a challenge, Rashad noted that their top athletes would also be difficult to beat.

Certain of Northwest’s eventual victory at Division Championships later this fall, team captain and junior Tyler Plunkett explained that this meet was very important for the team, as it gave them the opportunity to face their top competitors and gain experience they would need for their own future races. Given the course’s abundance of hills and turns, the course also proved to be a disadvantage to the team, but this would give them another opportunity to improve their own running for the future.

Yasmine Kass, Paint Branch’s top female runner and top finisher of the meet, stated after her race that the team had to “focus on what had to be done by any means necessary.”

Following the pre-race course walk – which is meant to make the runners familiar with the course’s twists and turns – familiar banter and laughs bounced between coaches as the runners prepared themselves for the first race. Parents and supporters positioned themselves to cheer and be prepared for the finishing of the races. The tone shifted to a more formal one as the teams chanted their traditional breakdowns, finished their warm-ups and lined up at the starting line.

As the varsity race started, the familiar roar of cheering from supportive parents and athletes spread across the field. At this particular meet, the athletes ran coed races, with the boys and girls running together. This was unusual, as the races are usually split up into four different races, separated by gender as well as team rank. Despite this, the runners positioned themselves on the line, ready to fight their way to the front. Parents, athletes, coaches and even a cheerleading squad ran to different spots beside the course to cheer on their runners and encourage them to finish strong.

Senior team captain Steven Anderson, proud of his team, said the meet “showed a lot of promise from the young people,” and applauded the freshman and sophomore athletes’ performances.

Both the varsity and junior varsity races finished fast, as usual, with handfuls of athletes crossing the finish line just seconds apart, and managers and volunteers scrambling to jot down their names, keep them in order and tally up the points. Paint Branch’s athletes performed well on all sides, with runners gaining confidence and setting personal records. The confidence boost even resulted in two of PB’s female runners, freshmen Ayana Khan and Jordan Shorter, to improve their times by about 5 minutes.

As senior runner Jordan Greene stated, Paint Branch’s Cross-Country Team “worked hard for each other and for [them]selves,” and came home stronger and  more confident in their abilities, as both individual runners and as a team, ready to face Clarksburg and Whitman High Schools on October 5th.