At their final meet to be held at Richard Montgomery this year, both the boys’ and girls’ teams suffered tremendously close losses to Walter Johnson’s cross country team. The boys lost by two points, 27 to 29, and the girls by only one point, finishing with 24 points to WJ’s 23.
Although there was a lot of disappointment to be had at the two narrow losses, many members of the RM squad still had tremendous races. Rohann Asfaw nearly broke the track record set by Evan Woods three years before with a blistering time of 15:30.
Tremendous races were also had by sophomore runner Thomas Del Vecchio, who dropped almost two whole minutes with a time of 18:37, and another sophomore star, Joachim El-Masry, who ran the three-mile course in 16:01, setting a new personal record by over a minute.
On the girls’ side, captain Sophie El-Masry once again led the RM squad with an impressive time of 18:28. She was closely followed by her sister, Nefret El-Masry, and senior captain Cynthia Kipserem, both of whom managed to set new personal records in the race. An especially incredible performance was given by senior Naomi Baumgold, who, although only having been a part of the team for two seasons, managed to drop a staggering four minutes from her first race of the 2015 season.
Because of the impressive performances by individual runners on both the girls and boys teams, Coach Nick Stavola confessed that he wasn’t too distraught about the overall losses, saying: “I’m just really pleased with how some people did today, and even though we didn’t get the win, this race sets a standard for the final half of the season that we really have to keep living up to.” The RM team’s next meet isn’t scheduled for another week so it is expected that they will begin their hardest training cycle yet this season and you can expect to see impressive results next race.
Even with the overall losses, they managed to end the meet on a happy note when it was announced that the team managed to raise over $250.00 for breast cancer awareness at the meet.
