10/7/2011
The NYA Girls Cross Country Team hosted its last home meet of the season on Friday. The course at Royal River Park was still slightly muddy from the heavier rains earlier in the week but that didn’t seem to slow down our harriers. All of the girls who finished the race ran stellar times compared with those back in early September on the same course. Although we did not finish the meet at full strength thanks to a stubborn shoe that decided Hadley’s foot fit better sliding out the ripped side than in the shoe we still were able to field 5 girls for a team score.
Hillary Detert led the pack from start to finish winning the race in a career best time of 20:26 – over 1 min. faster than 1 month ago. She was neck and neck with Freeport for the majority of the race until 400m to go when she 
kicked it into a higher gear and dropped the competition by over 15 seconds. Next up for NYA was Sarah who dropped her time by over 2 minutes and showed that she is well on the path to recovery. Hadley was on pace for a great day until the “shoe incident”. Ellis finished 3rd for NYA with a time just over 24 minutes – an insane 3+ minute improvement! Morgan was able to race for the first time in several weeks and even with 3 weeks off was still able to better her time by 30 seconds. And rounding out our scoring 5 was Emilie who bested her previous time on this course by 2.5 minutes and quickly retracted her earlier statement of how hard this course is.
As a team NYA finished behind both Freeport and Merriconeag but as the improvement was noticeable and will continue. It was bittersweet to end a long reign of the 5 seniors on the team: Maggie, Morgan, Sarah, Hadley, and Hillary with only 3 of them finishing the race however there are more to come and the team will be left in capable hands to the 3 freshman who have already stepped up to show that they mean business.
They team is back in action at the Western Maine Conference Championships at Community Park in Falmouth on Friday. Hope to see you there