<\/p>\n
It was an auspicious beginning to a league title for the Poly Jackrabbits at El Dorado Park on a hot, dusty course Thursday afternoon. <\/span>In the first league meet of the season, the Jackrabbits’ varsity runners stepped up in a big way, as Poly beat all six other league schools in both the boys and girls varsity races; seven of the top ten finishers in the two races were wearing green and gold.<\/p>\n In the boys’ race, Wilson and Poly were jockeying for position for the first lap-and-a-half, as expected. <\/span>Poly’s Christian Penn and Wilson’s Andrew Godsil were literally running next to each other with parallel strides at the half-way mark of the three-mile course. <\/span>But, although Wilson held spots three, four, and five for much of the first lap, Poly pulled away in the end, with Sean Price claiming the top time in the race (15:16). <\/span>He was followed by Godsil (15:30), and then, surprisingly, by three Poly runners as the Jackrabbits reversed the Bruins’ hold on those positions: Penn, Victor Espinoza, and Ruben Baerga came in 3-4-5. <\/span><\/p>\n The girls’ race was, as expected, much more of an individual battle, as Poly’s girls swept frosh\/soph, JV, and varsity. <\/span>But, with Dynasty Gammage and Rachel Pavey of Poly running against Millikan’s Paisley Pettway, Lakewood’s Kirstyn Nold, and Wilson’s Haley Kirk, it was certainly anyone’s race for the individual title. <\/span><\/p>\n Well\u2026at least, it was for the first mile. <\/span>Gammage and Pettway ran side-by-side for the first third, until they neared the lake on the northern side of the course, when Gammage began to pull away. <\/span>By the time they finished the first lap, she had opened a hefty lead between herself and Nold, teammate Pavey, and Pettway. <\/span>When the runners finished, not only was Gammage more than twenty seconds ahead of the competition, but she looked back to discover that her closest competition was Pavey, who took second, followed by Nold, and then another Poly runner, Tia Leake. <\/span>Pettway and Kirk finished fifth and sixth. <\/span>Poly could conceivable have finished even higher in the varsity race, but the ‘Rabbits coaches waved Elliott Gentile (a top-five runner) off the course when they saw she was hampered by a quad strain.<\/p>\n “We sat down with the team yesterday,” said Poly girls’ coach Nate Bershtel after the race, “And we said, ‘What do you want to do?’ <\/span>Dynasty said she wanted to finish first\u2014and Rachel said she wanted to finished right behind her.” <\/span>The biggest surprise may have been the senior, Leake, with a defeat of big-time talent in Pettway and Kirk. <\/span>Bershtel said Leake has run her two fastest races in the last two weeks, and she missed her personal record by just a second yesterday, on a course that ran slow for most of the field’s experienced runners.<\/p>\n But, despite Poly going 12-0 in the varsity races, the season is far from over\u2014Wilson’s varsity teams are sitting right behind them at 10-2, and of course, there’s still two more league meets\u2014the second of which, the league finals at Heartwell, will be worth as much as the first two meets combined. <\/span>But before the runners get there, they’ll race at Discovery Well Park in Signal Hill in two weeks, on Thursday, October 15th.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Jackrabbits swept the boys’ and girls’ varsity races, with a strong team performance that puts them out front after the first league 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