Senior Girls Cross-Country - Provincial Champs!

Our senior girls have successfully defended their provincial title!

The Cross-Country BC Championships is an ‘open’ competition, where ‘A’, ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ schools all compete in the same race. In order to earn a berth at the BC Championships, teams and individual athletes must qualify in 1 of 10 provincial zones. Then, the top teams and individuals from across the province converge upon the BC’s to determine who will be crowned individual and team champion. This past Saturday, November 5, 18 members of the WPGA senior cross-county team made the trip to Kelowna for the 2011 BC High School Championships. The meet took place at the Telemark/Biathlon Cross-Country Ski Area in West Kelowna, and this year’s event presented athletes with an extremely challenging course and wintery conditions.

The girls' race was comprised of the best 280 runners and 31 teams in the province. At 10:00am, the starter’s gun was fired, and at that time the thermometer still read a very brisk -6 degrees Celsius. This year’s course was a ‘brute’; the first 2.5km of the 4.5km course was predominantly uphill, while the last 2km was run on aggressively fast, frozen and frost-covered descents. The combination of the course and the conditions took its toll on many of the teams and athletes; however, none of the course challenges seemed to slow the Wolves, as Sophie Dodd and Audrey Warner both ran to personal bests finishing 13th and 14th overall. Tessa Ladner was the third Wolf across the line; she was followed by Mitali Patel, Jessica Dorfmann, Emily Kasa, Sarah Goelz, Katherine Tourigny, Nina Dauvergne, Suraya Bondy, Claire Warner and Christina Svoboda. These girls left everything on the course Saturday morning; their commitment to each other and the team earned them their second BC title, narrowly beating Oak Bay by three points. Points are awarded, in order, to a team’s top five racers across the finish line.

The final top 10 ten team results are as follows:

1. WPGA – 123 pts.

2. Oak Bay – 126 pts.

3. Nanaimo District – 186 pts.

4. Nechako Valley – 220 pts.

5. Walnut Grove – 234 pts.

6. Revelstoke – 279 pts.

7. WJ Mouat – 281 pts.

8. College Heights – 338 pts.

9. Semiahmoo – 341 pts.

10. Sentinel – 353 pts.

The boys' race looked very much the same as the girls, the only difference being that their course raced over 6.7km; the additional 2.2km contained several more hills and descents, taking an already challenging course to the next level. The WPGA boys, Alex Coote, George Huang and James Galbraith, all ran with heart and put in huge efforts on race day. The boys capped off a strong season at Kelowna and look forward to taking another shot at the course in 2013.

The team would like to say good-bye and thank you to the following grads for their years of dedication, effort and leadership. Your ‘spikes’ will be very hard to fill; you will be missed.