Trouble Afoot!: 2009 FHSAA Region 1-3A / 2A Cross Country Meet

On 14 November 2009 Florida's capital was the cross-country running capital of north Florida, as high school teams from Pensacola to Jacksonville converged on Sunnyhill Farm in Tallahassee for the Region 1 championship. It's the last step in Florida's state championship series before the actual state championship meet at Little Everglades Ranch near Dade City. The class 2A and 3A teams in the competition were fighting to qualify for a trip to the state meet. 56 teams arrived at the course that morning, but only 24 would go on to the state championships.

The 3A girls ran first. The runners disappeared from the starting field immediately, but by the end of the first mile reports came back that Chiles' Lily Williams had taken the lead, closely trailed by her teammate Carly Thomas, the defending champion of Region 1. For the rest of the 5K race Williams and Thomas continued to move away from the rest of the field, but Williams never got away from Thomas. When the leaders burst into sight of the finish line back on the starting field, it was still all Williams and Thomas, and that's how it remained, with Lily Williams winning the Region 1 title in 18:30, and Thomas a few steps back in 18:32. With four runners in the top ten and all five scorers in the top 20, Chiles won its seventh-straight Region 1-3A team title with 34 points, comfortably ahead of the 59 points scored by runners-up Fort Walton Beach. Ridgeview (114 points), Creekside (119 points), Vanguard (149 points), and Niceville (171 points) also qualified to advance to the state championships.

"The best running talent in northeast Florida is Jimmy Clark," declared my Usually Reliable Albeit Disreputable Source from Jacksonville the afternoon before the Region 1 meet. The Source's assessment was confirmed during the second half 3A boys race, as Creekside's Jimmy Clark ran away from almost all of his competitors. However, he Clark couldn't shake off Leon's two-time state cross-country champion, Matt Mizereck, and Mizereck ran by him on the final stretch for the win, 15:27 to 15:29. In the team standings, Leon took three of the top four places and the Region 1-3A title, scoring 62 points. Runners-up Pensacola Washington scored 82. The other teams qualifying for the state championships were Fort Walton Beach (83 points), Niceville (158 points), Chiles (177 points), and Navarre (181 points). Clark's performance turned out to be one of the few bright spots for northeast Florida, as none of the District 2 teams advanced to the state meet.

By the second kilometer of the 2A girls' 5K, Stephanie Strasser of Fernandina Beach had started to move away from the rest of the runners in the race. Running steadily through three kilometers before slowing slightly on the last two kilometers, Strasser crossed the finish line in 18:18, the fastest girls' time on the course that morning. Bishop Kenny's Sarah Davis was the next runner in at 18:42, followed by her teammate Elizabeth Tucker in 19:02. Davis and Tucker led Bishop Kenny to a narrow team victory over their Jacksonville rivals, Bolles, 46 to 49. Episcopal (72 points) , Matanzas (148 points), South Walton (169 points) and West Florida (202 points) also won the right to compete at the state championships.

Bishop Kenny was even more dominant in the 2A boys' race, as B.K.'s Colin Barker and Michael Wallace ran away from the rest of the field to capture the top two spots in 16:06 and 16:09. Kenny's fifth scorer crossed the line in seventeenth, and Bishop Kenny won the Region 1-2A boys' title with 35 points. Nease placed as a distant runner-up with 83 points. The remaining four state qualifiers were Bolles (153 points), Matanzas (156 points), Fernandina Beach (161 points), and West Florida (175 points). In almost a reverse of the situation in the Region 1-3A boys' race, five of the six teams to qualify were from northeast Florida, and West Florida was the only District 1 team to advance to the state championships.

The Region 1 3A / 2A meet marked the debut of Sunnyhill Farm as a cross-country running venue. The farm is private property, closed to runners throughout the year, which makes it neutral ground--it's no one's home course, so no one has a home course advantage. The hills are gentle, most of the ground is soft, and the footing is punctuated by holes, but this is cross country. It's a scenic place to run, with a good mix of woods and fields. For spectators--well, there's plenty of parking. You get to see a couple of hundred meters of the start of each race and a couple of hundred meters at the end of each race. A short stroll across a hedgerow will get you a view across a peanut field of another few hundred meters of the race, but that's it. For most fans, this isn't a good spectator course.

From the Region 1 meet, qualifiers advance to the FHSAA cross-country state championship at Little Everglades Ranch north of Dade City, Florida on November 21. There, the Tallahassee Leon boys will attempt to defend their 2008 FHSAA-3A state title, the Tallahassee Chiles girls will attempt to defend their 2008 FHSAA-3A state title, the Bishop Kenny girls will attempt to defend their FHSAA-2A state title, and the Bishop Kenny boys will attempt to win their seventh state title.

3A Girls' Team Standings