It was a strong day in the final team race of the year for the Lady Navy.  On wednesday the girls cross country team along with the boys team traveled to Loriella Park to compete in the Group 4A North Regional championships.  There were sixteen teams at the competition, and the HHS girls went into the race ranked 12th on paper.  They exceeded this expectation by finishing 11th place, only five points of of 10th.

Juniors Laurie Serrell and Brenna Cowardin led the pack, placed in the top 30 for most of the race.  Both juniors ran relatively close to each other until they had a little over half a mile left.  At this point, Serrell took the lead and ended up finishing in 24th place with a time of 21:09, this ranked her in the top-20 all time in the 36 years of the HHS cross country program.

“I did a lot better than I expected. I pushed myself harder than I normally do,” Serrell said.

As the team was in a new conference this year, individual qualifiers for state could either be in the top six placing teams, or could go by being one of the top ten qualifiers outside of those teams.  This new factor caused Serrell to end up placing 8th out of those ten, therefore qualifying for the state meet at the Great Meadows Foundation in The Plains, VA.

“I am proud of myself for being the only one. We do everything as a team so being the only one going doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s not going to stop me from doing well at states,” Serrell said.

Behind Serrell and Cowardin, was the freshman pair of Molly Campillo and Lydia Ligouri.  Unlike previous races where the two stayed in a pack with the rest of the varsity members, this time they set the pace themselves, leaving the others to decide if they wanted to stay up with them.  The pack behind them never quite got together. For the first mile, the pack of junior Morgan Heckman and seniors Julie Raab and Celia Ehrenpreis stayed together but at the mile point Ehrenpreis began to lead the pack.  After that the group split up and never regrouped, with Ehrenpreis finishing 5th for the team, followed by Raab and then Heckman.  These placings gave the team a total of 273 points earning them their overall 11th place finish.

“I think the team tried their hardest. I put in the same amount of effort as everyone else, but this race was just my time to shine,” Serrell said.