By Heather Carr, Staff Writer
The Fountain Valley boys cross-country team competed at the CIF-Prelims last Saturday in hopes of finishing in the top five teams in their race in order to move on to Finals, and later the state meet. However, after some of the top runners graduated last year, it became apparent that qualifying for the next round in the preliminaries would prove difficult, especially amongst a highly competitive field, where the Barons placed 10th out of 18 teams in their heat.
In addition, although Galyn Nash (’15) led the team by running a time of 15:58 and placing 16th among 125 athletes, he had failed to qualify as an individual against some of the top-ranked runners and teams in southern California.
According to head coach J.D Krawczyk, the disappointing results were largely derived from mentality issues.
“It seems that they came in with the wrong attitude,” Krawczyk said. “Granted, out of all three heats, we had the toughest heat, we still had to run 100% and find some sort of purpose in the race when the chances are slim of you qualifying. If you have a negative thought during the work or race, you’ve got to have multiple positive thoughts or motivation to counteract it.”
However, though the Barons were dissatisfied with their performance, they acknowledged that with over half of the varsity team consisting of sophomores and it gave the young squad the experience they would need to prepare themselves in future years.
“Personally, I think this race was hard-Took a toll on the team,” said Joseph Martinez (’15), who had placed third in the squad. “But hopefully the sophomores that run in this race will gain experience for the future races we all have.”
Krawczyk agreed, and says that the team is looking forward to next year.
“But the main thing to take away from this is that we’ve got a very young group that got the experience, and that’ll pay off because next year won’t be something new,” Krawczyk concluded.
