Setting Standards in Jacksonville, Oxford, and Pleasant Valley

Calhoun Journal, AL – Jacksonville girls win first-ever Calhoun County Cross Country title, Oxford boys edge PV by a point; Oxford’s Katie Keur, Noah George sweep individual races in meet, course record times

By Al Muskewitz

The Jacksonville girls cross country team has been knocking on the door all season long. Thursday morning on the McClellan Trail, they broke through in a big way.

All it took was going out there relaxed and just run.

The Lady Golden Eagles put three runners in the top 10, four in the top 15 and all five counters in the top 20 to edge three-time reigning champion and long-time nemesis White Plains by three points for their first-ever Calhoun County Cross-Country Championship title.

“My girls were really nervous,” coach Jill Green said. “We tried to joke around a little bit to relax them. As far as saying anything that really inspired them, we just tried to relax. They get extremely nervous. I just think it boiled down to us relaxing a little bit. Not being so uptight and running. They relaxed and ran as they should.”

Actually, the Lady Golden Eagles had a little more inspiration going for them than that. They embraced the good feelings that came out of watching “McFarland USA,” the cross-country themed Kevin Costner vehicle about a team that espoused a family atmosphere, and carried it to great heights.

“To be honest, we’re shocked,” sophomore Sarah Sloughfy said. “We never expected to start the season and end as county champions. It’s just crazy. We run as a family and we just focus on building on each other up and we knew if we build each other up and help each other the wins would come. That’s what it’s been. We’re just happy that we came out here and ran together and finished strong.”

The boys race was a real dogfight. Oxford went 1-2 and got a lot of help from the back end to win that title for the second time in three years in a one-point nail-biter over Pleasant Valley, 30-31.

“The margin is exactly as expected; I figured it’d be less than two,” Oxford coach Landon Delozier said. “Pleasant Valley is an outstanding team, everybody here knows how great they are. To be able to contend with them and work with them, it was fun. It was a nail-biter literally from the gun.”

The boys races have gotten to be like that the last couple years. It was the third time in the last four years the boys race has been decided by one point or a tiebreaker and five of the last six have been decided by four points or less. This time, 10 of the top 12 runners were either from Oxford or PV.

“There was nobody in there to break up the points, so it was just a crap-shoot.,” PV coach Brad Hood said. “It just came down to one person passing one person. I’m proud of them. It wasn’t supposed to be that close. The kids showed up and showed out. That was awesome. You can’t be disappointed. That is a dominating 1 and 2 in the county. I’ve never seen it like that … not like where we just left everybody.”

Every runner had to do their part, but it was the back end of the lineup that was the key. Oxford senior Andrew Nordan ran a PR 17:41.55 for sixth place and squeezed between two PV runners for valuable points. The next two Yellow Jackets’ scorers, Braxton Snider and freshman Phil Copeland, pulled in behind the other two runners not from the contending teams in the top 12 and cut off PV’s fourth and fifth scorers.

“Nordan was huge,” Delozier said. “I can’t say how critical his push was today. Honestly, I didn’t know he had that much fight in him; I really didn’t. He’s a great kid, a great athlete, but I did not know he had that much fight in him. To see him go out and chase those guys and actually make passes, that was super impressive. And then the two others after him were just as critical as he was.”

Oxford’s Katie Keur and Noah George swept the individual races, both winning in course and meet record times. Keur won the girls race in 18:26.62, while George shattered the records he set last year in winning the boys race in 16:11.20.

Keur and White Plains’ Maddyn Conn ran stride-for-stride ahead of the pack for the first half of the race, but the Lady Jackets’ senior began pulling away about the two-mile mark and won her first county title by some 14 seconds over her running friend and rival.

Keur was the first girls runner to go sub-19 in the county meet and her time was nine seconds faster than she ran when beating her friend in the Bulldog Twilight Invite. It’s just the continuation of a strong second half to the season that has done wonders for her confidence.

“I felt maybe I could maybe get in the 19s, maybe get in the 20s, but I never thought I could be running with girls I knew were fast,” Keur said. “The whole state knows these girls. It was definitely a switch that clicked at Jesse Owens that I have more ability than I thought I did.”

George led the boys race wire-to-wire. He didn’t go out for a PR on this crisp morning, but he did want to break his record. His time was some 15 seconds faster than he ran here last year.

“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a PR today just because I was going to be by myself for most of if not all the race, so I wasn’t really trying to get a PR,” he said. “I wasn’t really trying to set such a super low time, I was just trying to break (the record) by a little bit more.”

Calhoun County X-C Championship