GCI cross country meet delivers on its promise
Another Greene County Invitational cross country meet has come and gone and this one lived up to expectations. With several quality teams in the area it was a competitive meet as expected.
The Eastern Greene girls and Bloomfield boys captured the team titles.
The Lady Thunderbirds placed five runners in the top 10 with a total time of 114 minutes, edging Bloomfield by 11 seconds. The Cardinal boys came in with a total time of 91:51, 36 seconds ahead of Eastern Greene.
Bloomfield's Alli Workman and Clay Reynolds of Shakamak were the individual champions as expected.
Workman was less than 100 percent for the meet having felt sick all week. But she won in typical Workman-like fashion, separating herself from the field and cruising to a 61-second victory over Liz Bredeweg of Shakamak.
Reynolds pulled away in the last mile to outrun Linton-Stockton's Janzen Franklin. Reynolds won in a time of 16:22 to Franklin's 16:51.
The two had run neck-and-neck for the first two miles until Reynolds made his move.
It was the first county meet run on White River Valley's newly-designed layout. WRV boys coach Mike Karr says the new layout is a tougher course.
Unlike most meets, the GCI is scored on the cumulative time for each team's top five runners instead of the sum of the top five's places.
Sometimes the different scoring format makes a difference in the team standings - but this year it didn't.
If the meet had been scored on placements Eastern Greene still would have come out ahead of the Lady Cardinals 30-43. The Cardinal boys likewise would have outscored Eastern Greene 41-46 the old-fashioned way.
But it seemed to make a difference last year.
The Lady Cardinals finished one-and-a-half minutes ahead of Shakamak and the Eastern Greene T-Birds finished three minutes faster than the WRV Wolverines.
Shakamak turned the tables on everyone in the Southwest Indiana Athletic Conference meet five weeks later with the Lakers and the Lady Lakers sweeping team honors.
As Eastern Greene boys coach Ray Hausler said after last year's conference meet, "There are four strong teams in the conference. We could race four weeks in a row and the outcome could be different each week."
I anticipate another interesting and competitive SWIAC meet when our five area teams gather at Shakamak Saturday, Oct. 3.
Congratulations to the GCI champion Eastern Greene Lady Thunderbirds and the Bloomfield Cardinals and our individual winners Clay Reynolds and Alli Workman.
Terry Schwinghammer is a sports writer for the Greene County Daily World. He can be reached by telephone at (812) 847-4487, ext. 27. He can also be reached via email at tschwing32@yahoo.com.
- -- Posted by Goodnite on Wed, Sep 9, 2015, at 4:05 PM
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