Great Oak Girls are consistently good, and who is Palos Verdes?!
Full results from Girls D1/D2 Team Sweepstakes
It is late October, so perhaps it's not entirely out of line to say that the 2015 Great Oak girls and the 2016 squad are... eerily similar.
The Wolfpack easily defended their Mt. SAC D1 Team Sweepstakes title and scored just 38 points with the D1 and D2 teams combined. The four returners from 2015 recorded nearly identical results in both years.
Check out the chart below.
| ATHLETe | 2015 time | 2016 time |
|---|---|---|
| 17:26 | 17:30.7 | |
| 17:43 | 17:43.6 | |
| 17:50 | 17:50.8 | |
| DNR | 17:54.9 | |
| 17:55 | 17:59 | |
| DNR | 18:23.9 | |
| 18:33 | 18:34.9 |
Looks like the Wolfpack is ready to repeat their CIF D1 state title and get back on the podium at NXN.
But the final results behind the U.S. No. 4 ranked team were a little more surprising.
In the combined D1/D2 results, unranked Palos Verdes (105 points) and Claremont (141 points) finished second and third ahead of U.S. No. 13 Arcadia (4th, 158 points) and U.S. No. 5 Davis (5th, 181 points). The most recent California Saucony Flo50 rankings place Palos Verdes at No. 5 and Claremont at No. 4 behind the big three of Great Oak, Davis and Arcadia.
What happened?
Well, Davis' 4-5-6 runners (Abigail Fisk, Charlotte Mitchell, Aniela Mitchell) are somewhat interchangeable based on their results at Stanford and Clovis. At Mt. SAC, the Mitchells did not run and Fisk finished No. 1 for the Blue Devils (17th, 18:05), indicating either a breakthrough for her or that the typical top three (Sofia Castiglioni, Olivia O'Keeffe, Sophia Lodigiani) were holding back.
Arcadia head coach Michael Feraco-Eberle let us know before the race that the Apaches' No. 4, Cindy Liang, would not compete due to a conflict with SAT testing. While Mt. SAC was their breakout race last year, the Apaches seem to be plagued by injuries this fall and defending champion Holly Lung finished just 13th today.
Claremont has looked good all year and even cracked the top 25 for a few weeks before falling slightly after a tough fourth place finish at Roy Griak in Minnesota. Annie Boos led the squad with a 17:53, ninth-place run.
So who is Palos Verdes?
They're very lightly raced, though they dominated the Palos Verdes Invitational. Leader Mazzy Genovese had a breakout race to place fifth in 17:41 and the rest of the top five followed through the line with a 52-second spread and 18:14 three-mile average.
The next Saucony Flo50 national XC rankings come out on Monday, Oct. 31....
Of note: Claremont was crowned the D2 Sweepstakes champion, as Palos Verdes is actually a D3 school and "raced up" in classification.
