“I’m hoping we can win at state and go undefeated and just go out there and perform to the best of our ability,” sophomore Evan Schulte said.
In order to achieve this, the runners put in work to set themselves up for what has started as a good season. At the Liberty Invitational on Sept. 3, both the boys and girls showcased their hard work with wins. Both teams also won at the Forest Park Invitational Sept. 10, one of the largest and most competitive meets in the country. The early success is a testament to the work the teams put in.
“We all just started training really hard after last year’s off-season,” Schulte said. “We had all the varsity guys training over the summer so we’re hoping hard work will pay off.”
Schulte said although the runners have put in the work, they can’t get too cocky. Even though RBHS is nationally ranked, the team has not yet proven itself against other nationally ranked teams. They must continue to work hard.
“I try not to let rankings get into my mentality and how I practice and race,” junior Nathan Keown said. “I more use that as a nice compliment that other programs respect us but at the same time we still have to go in and do all to work necessary and try to live up to that expectation.”
The representation on a national scale brings pressure that was not present in the past. RBHS is the only cross country team nationally ranked from Missouri.
The ranking “is not supposed to affect us but I can still see it a little bit. I feel myself a little more tense at times, not quite as laid back as I have felt in the past,” Coach Neal Blackburn said. “I feel like we have to live up to those expectations and represent Missouri nationally, but also at the same time I also have to catch myself and realize it’s just one person’s opinion and we just need to try to take care of business and stick with what got us here.”
The girls’ team has not started the season with the same hype as the boys. However, the success of the boys has motivated the girls to work harder, which they showed with a win at the Forest Park Invitational, where the girls beat one of the top teams in the state, Eureka.
“It is nice to work around such a good team. We get to see how hard they work and what their work has done and that makes us work harder,” senior Sam Garrett said. “We like being the underdog. The Rock Bridge boys are not the only good cross country team at Rock Bridge.”
The girls want to beat their eighth place finish in 2008, when Garrett was a freshman. The team is traveling to Chicago, Ill. for the Palatine Invitational, one of the most competitive meets in the country.
“It will help us compete on the same level we will see at state,” Garrett said, “so when we get to the state meet we won’t be like, ‘everyone is so fast,’ we will be ready.”
For the boys the Palatine Invitational provides the toughest competition all season. They will race two nationally ranked programs, Palatine and York.
“I think [the Palatine Invitational] is going to be a wake up call,” Blackburn said. It gives us “an advantage because we can go in and make ourselves vulnerable to the competition and it’s not like we lost a chance at a state championship or we lost a chance to qualify for state. We get a chance to run against some of the best competition in the country.”
Even with all the expectations going into the season the boys maintain focus on their main goal, a state championship.
“Even though we’re ranked number one right now, we still haven’t got the state title,” Keown said, “and it definitely makes it that much bigger of a goal.”
By Thomas Jamieson-Lucy
