On Saturday October 24, Brown County High School hosted the boys and girls semi state cross-country meet. After a strong season, Gibson Southern had a total of five runners advance. On the girl’s team, freshman Aleks Parmer and Courtney Heldt, juniors Taylor Hart, Olivia Pennington and Helen Kiesel, and seniors Ashley Evetts and Raegan Heldt participated. On the boy’s team freshman Alex Spindler and Hayden Pennington participated in the meet.

“We trained very hard all season, putting in many miles and working to get faster over the 5k distance,” Head Coach Jeremy Aydt said. “The weeks leading into regional and semi state, we lightened the load a little and had a few days of fun activities, like kickball, relays, and tag. We had a few days of 30-45 minute runs as well.” 

The girls ran first and at the sound of the gun, the culmination of a season had begun. The conditions were frigid cold and slightly wet, but that did not stop the runners. Taylor Hart finished with the fastest time of 20 minutes 30 seconds and Raegan Heldt finished right behind with a time of 20 minutes 50 seconds.

“Everyone knows in their head where they need to be in comparison to teammates and other people from schools we have competed against all year,” junior Olivia Pennington.

said. “Especially into the postseason we all prepared and studied the results the week before to see what times and what teams we needed to make sure we were in front of if we wanted to continue to move on.”

As the girls finished up, it was time for the boys to step up to the big stage. 

“The strategy for Alex Spindler and I and it was to get out fast because we knew that if you don’t then you can very easily get pushed to the back of the pack because it was a very narrow and fast course,” freshman Hayden Pennington. “We wanted to pace ourselves off one another and we also had kids from other teams that we had previously been running with that we set our sights on to beat.” 

They stuck to that, with Alex and Hayden both finishing in under 18 minutes. Alex finished ahead placing 105th with a time of 17 minutes 29 seconds. Hayden finished not far behind placing 135th with a time of 17 minutes 57 seconds.