WALNUT — Saturday morning brought an excellent display of long-distance running to rainy Mt. San Antonio College as several Daily News area schools competed in the second day of the CIF Southern Section Cross Country prelims. Seven area schools and five individual runners advanced to next Saturday’s section finals.
Due to the rain, the course for the CIF-SS prelims this weekend was run on mostly flat pavement around the Mt. Sac campus and then was finished in the football stadium on the track. Traditionally, the course at Mt. Sac involves a lot of incline in the bald hills around the campus and difficult switchbacks runners would have had to run on.
The boys and girls teams of Oaks Christian, Chaminade, Harvard-Westlake and Oak Park all advanced to next week’s finals. Harvard-Westlake and Oak Park’s team won both their heats on the day.
The Oak Park girls team finished with six runners in the top 18 of their heat and the Oak Park boys team finished with five runners in the top 15 of their heat. Kathleen Lambe led the way for the Oak Park girls team, finishing in seventh place with a time of 18:06. Dmitri Natale led the way for the Oak Park boys team, finishing in fifth place with a time of 15:26.
“We planned to go into this race looking for placement and to save our best for finals,” Natale said. “I felt good from the gun and just stuck with the pack and kept my eyes in front of me.”
There were also four individual heat winners from the area. Two of the individual winners came from Oaks Christian in Division 4, as Arizechukwu Nwosu won one of the boys heats with a time of 15:12 and Delaney Napieral won with a time of 17:14.
Braulio Castillo of West Ranch won his Division 3 heat with a time of 14:50 and helped lead the Wildcats to a first-place finish in the heat as a team. Maggie De La Rionda won a Division 3 heat for Thousand Oaks with a time of 17:21 and will be the lone representative for the Lancers girls team next week in the finals.
“It feels great to get the win. After winning the Foothill League, I was coming in with a lot of confidence.” Castillo said. “Our goal now is to go for state and come away with a plaque.”
Harvard-Westlake won the Mission League in boys and girls cross country and followed it up by winning both of their Division 4 heats today. Chaminade also had a strong showing in Division 4, winning their boys heat and then finishing fourth place in their girls heat behind Harvard-Westlake and Oaks Christian. The two leading runners for the Chaminade boys team, Esteban Robles and Landon Scott, finished tied for fourth place in their heat with times of 15:11.3.
“We just came today to qualify and hopefully boost our confidence a little bit.” Harvard-Westlake head coach Tim Sharpe said. “I told our kids to embrace today in the rain and I thought our team handled it well.”
The other area teams to qualify for next week’s finals were Agoura’s boys team in Division 3 and Simi Valley’s girls team in Division 3. Jenna Murray and Zachary Hatch both individually qualified for the finals in Division 3 for Moorpark, with Murray finishing her heat in third place with a time of 17:25 and Hatch in fifth with a time of 15:25.
Agoura’s Reese Tamburro will move on to the finals after finishing in fourth behind Murray with a time of 17:30. Oren Hill of Thousand Oaks finished his heat in Division 3 in second with a time of 14:50 to move on to the finals as well.