Jakob Hiett won his fourth straight cross-country race, but he wasn’t the only Sweet Home runner who did well at the Three Course Challenge at Camp Rilea near Warrenton Saturday.
Hiett won the boys medium course race and Nicole Rasmussen was 12th in the girls difficult course race, a field of 261 runners. The event is divided into three separate boys and girls races, on courses rated easy, medium and hard on roads and trails over sand hills and along the ocean front and grass fields of the seaside base.
The easy course was 4500 meters and the medium and hard courses were 5000, but the hard course featured a long climb up a sand hill and some tough narrow trails that the medium course did not, Coach Billy Snow said.
The event included 87 teams, split between Oregon and Washington and ranging from 6A down to 1A in size, and two from California. Five Sky-Em League teams were there.
Hiett, a junior, had moved to the lead in the field of 446 runners half a mile into his race and led from there, winning in 18:23, five seconds ahead of Mountain View (Bend) senior Sam King.
Snow said he put Hiett in the medium race because he had a sore knee.
“He wanted to run the hard, but I said, ‘Let’s just run the medium,’” Snow said. “He seems to be hanging in there.”
Rasmussen was the first Oregon 4A-level runner to finish in her race and the second in Sweet Home’s division, running 24:42. Amber Rose of Ingelmoor (Wash.) was the winner, in 23:13 and the top Oregon runner was Delaney Clem of Pendleton, fourth in 23:40.
Team scores in the meet are calculated, using a formula, by runners’ finishes in the three races. The Huskies were able to field enough competitors in the three events to qualify for team scoring, but they were one runner short on the girls side.
Sweet Home’s boys were 10th in the Division 3 standings, with 1125 points. Sisters boys were second in Division 4, with 326 points, followed directly by La Pine in third (479), and the Outlaw girls were also second in their division (319 points). Teams are assigned to divisions based on school size.
Two exchange students, Mami Sakamoto of Japan and Linh Vu of Vietnam, have started working out with the Sweet Home girls, but Sakamoto was still waiting for clearance by the OSAA and Vu had not had enough practice yet to run last weekend, he said.
Snow put Sakamoto in an open race that followed the high school competition and she was able to run the medium course, he said.
Overall, he said, the Huskies did well, especially the varsity runners.
“All of our kids except one finished in the top half.”
In the boys difficult race, Ian Wingo was 79th of 450 in 22:21, followed by Chace Hutchins (209th in 24:50) and Stephen Bishop (214th in 24:53).
Sierra Swanson, the only other girl in the difficult race, was 109th in 28:53.
Behind Hiett in the medium race, Joseph Rasmussen was 263rd in 25:14 and Aaron Blanchard was 340th in 27:00.
On the girls side, in a field of 276 runners, freshman Natasha Rasmussen, who is primarily a volleyball player this fall, was 54th in 26:41 – third in Sweet Home’s division, followed by fellow freshman Dana Hiett (91st in 28:10), Kaylene Keeney (101st in 28:26) and Maria Daniels (229th in 34:32).
Snow said he was pleased by Daniels’ run, in which she finished 3½ minutes faster than she did last year on the shorter, easy course.
“Maria had a great race,” he said. “There were 70-some kids behind her. She’s coming along. We’ll run her with the varsity this week and test her out. With that (Seaside) kind of race, you can’t really tell where they’re at.”
On the easy boys course, freshman Issac Justham ran 17:55 to finish 70th in a field of 416, and freshman Nick Tolman was 289th in 22:11.
Sweet Home Junior High runners also competed in the 3000-meter middle school competition.
Eighth-grader Noah Taraski finished 11th out of 73, in 12:45, closely followed by Tanner Vannice (15th in 13:02), Noah Dinsfriend (17th in 13:06) and Eric Seitz (24th in 13:31).
On the girls side, eighth-grader Bethany Gingerich, who is also playing volleyball this fall, was 11th of 49 runners, in 14:48.
The Huskies host the Camp Tadmor Invitational Tuesday, starting with a junior high/open race at 3:30 p.m. They will then travel to Cottage Grove Thursday for the Harrier’s Challenge at Dorena Lake. Both feature steep climbs.
“Thursday will be fun,” Snow said, noting that all of the Sky-Em teams are expected to be present. “We’ll be running tired because it will be our third race in five days. But if we can compete running tired, that will be a good sign.”