Catch them if you can

Record-setting Comets vying for state MS cross country titles on Saturday

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

Before every meet, Charles City Middle School boys cross country coach Eric Hoefer walks the course with his Global Positioning System App activated. He wants to make sure his runners are trekking an actual two-mile path.

Because this year either the courses are being marked off well short or the Comets have just gotten historically faster.

“This group is in a class by itself,” Hoefer said a day after his runners won the Northeast Iowa Conference Championship Meet while placing seven runners in the top 11.

Scoring a first-place total of 20 team points, Charles City finished well ahead of runner-up Decorah (54) … but really, it wasn’t even that close.

Antwone Cooper dominated the 86-runner field for the Comets with a first-place time of 11 minutes, 11 seconds. He was followed by scoring teammates Jacob Vais, who placed second (11:28), Austin Connerley (3rd), Zach Graeser (5th) and Aaron Jensen (9th).

Griffin Franksain and Logan Luft finished 10th and 11th, respectively, for the Comets.

Cooper’s time is a school record. Vais’s time — if it weren’t for Cooper — would have been a school record.

Last season as a seventh-grader, Luft set the Charles City Middle School record with a time of 11:36. His eighth-grade season has been hampered due to a broken leg he sustained this past summer.

“He ran exceptionally well,” Hoefer said of Luft. “He’s only been back for a few weeks, and he’s already dropped two minutes from his first race back.

“You’ve got to be in such good shape to come back like that.”

The season’s finish line is approaching for Charles City Middle School’s boys and girls teams. This Saturday, they will compete at the State Middle School Meet hosted by Ankeny Centennial.

Last season, Charles City won the Class 3A seventh-grade boys race.

“We beat Gilbert by 1 point,” Hoefer said.

The Comet MS girls have a resident school record setter themselves in eighth-grader Kiki Connell. At the NEIC meet, Connell for the first time got under 12 minutes by the slimmest of margins (11:59.9) while winning the race by a not-so-slim margin, finishing ahead of runner-up Fiona Buresh of Decorah by more than 45 seconds.

“She just made it real hard for any of our future runners to come close to matching that,” Charles City MS girls coach Karleen Sickman said.

As a team, Charles City girls placed third behind winner Waverly-Shell Rock and runner-up Decorah. Only 7 points separated the three teams.

“We were only 4 points behind Decorah,” Sickman said, “and they were last year’s state champs.”

At the state meet, schools have the option of running as a single squad in one of the eighth-grade races, or to split the squad up to also run in one of the seventh-grade races.

“We decided we’re going to run as one in the eighth-grade race,” Sickman said. “You can only go up a grade, and we’re moving our seventh-graders up.”

Two of those seventh-graders are Lydia Staudt and Kaylee Hennick, who finished 7th and 15th, respectively, at the NEIC Meet.

The Comet boys also had top-placing seventh-graders in Vais and Franksain.

“But we’re going to run them in the seventh-grade race,” Hoefer said. “Normally, that’s what we like to do with our seventh-graders unless our eighth-graders needed help filling one of the scoring spots. I don’t think our eighth-graders need that help.”