Montana Bass ’18
The CC women’s cross country team took fourth in regional championships last weekend, qualifying three runners (Allysa Warling ’19, Leah Wessler ’17, and Katie Sandfort ’17) for the NCAA National Meet Nov. 21. This comes after wrapping up October with an exciting win and another Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championship in October. Additionally, in exclusive voting by the head coaches of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, CC’s Ted Castaneda was selected SCAC Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season.
As part of the team’s conference win, six of the Tiger’s runners finished in the top 10 and junior Leah Wessler captured her second consecutive individual title at Stone Creek Golf Club in Sherman, Texas. She also repeated as SCAC Women’s Runner of the Year.
Wessler said much of the team’s success this season is owed to the addition of “awesome new runners, who pushed returning athletes to work even harder.” The team also lost only one senior from the previous season. “We were able to build on the momentum of last year, when we finally beat our rival, Trinity,” said Wessler.
But the team has overcome some challenges en route to the championship. Last year, tendonitis flared up in Wessler’s ankle during track season, so this year she maintained a regimen of consistent icing and massages. The addition of new recruits and different racing styles required team-wide adjustments. “Members of a good team need to know and predict the movements of other teammates around them during a race, so people know when to step in for a member who is having a bad race, when to make a move on runners of another team, and so on,” said Wessler. “I think one of the reasons we were so successful at the conference meet was that we have fully adjusted to the new team dynamics, and we were running for each other as well as for ourselves.”
About two weeks leading up to a big race, the team “eases up” their workouts. “I usually stop doing two-a-days to rest my legs,” said Wessler. The day before the race, they run the course to make sure everyone knows route. “I’m very good at getting lost,” Wessler admitted.
Though they felt fairly confident entering the conference meet, Wessler called the course one of the most difficult the team had experienced this season. “Usually my mind wanders a lot during races, but there were so many ups and downs, swamps, mud puddles, and sharp turns, that there was always something to pay attention to,” she explained. “I was pretty stressed by how fast my energy and adrenaline were subsiding because of all the hills and mud.”
