We’re entering the “championship season” the next few weeks. We’ll gradually change our focus in practice to refine some of the skills we’ve been working on all season. We’ll work on learning our pacing better, and getting practice running at your maximum potential 5k pace.
First up is Borough Championships hosted by Kenai at Tsalteshi Trails next Saturday 9/26. This is a championship between the School District Teams (Seward, Soldotna, Homer, Nikiski, …). We’ll treat this as a warmp/preview for the next few weeks.
The next Saturday 10/3 is Regional Championships at Tsalteshi Trails again. This is different this year. Normally this is all the teams in our Region 3 small schools: Grace, ACS, (both ANC teams), Seward, Kenai, Homer, etc… We compete at this meet to qualify for the State Championships. Normally the top teams go on to state as a team, in addition the top 15 individuals also qualify if they aren’t part of a qualifying team.
This season they’ve split the Region 3 Championship into two separate competitions, Pennisula teams and Anchorage teams. There are two Region 3 meets, one at Tsalteshi and one in Anchorage. The top 8 boys and girls from each meet will go on to state, no team competition this year. This was done to keep the Anchorage and Pennisula teams separate for these races and to limit the number of athletes at the state championship course. We are expecting to qualify a good number of athletes this year for state, they’ve been racing really well the last few weeks.
The next Saturday 10/10 is the State Championships, possibly in Anchorage. We don’t know enough yet about where and how this will work. Last I heard the location and racing are still TBD. We may need to carpool for this meet, and it’s still uncertain if we’ll need to overnight somewhere. We should know more by middle of next week.
Thanks parents for keeping up with this season so well. We have a great group of kids and the results show how hard they’ve been working and what a great team they’ve become.