Though this year brought a much closer race for the Capital District cross country trophy, in the end the championship outcome did not change. The Atlee boys won their fourth straight title while the Lee-Davis girls completed a repeat win.

  Both individual champions where run away winners. Atlee junior Andrew Catanese took the boys’ title and Runner of the Year honors by beating out Lee-Davis’ Cody Snyder by nearly 12 seconds. Catanese finished the 5k race in 16:50.82 while Snyder came in second at 17:02.54.

  Atlee head coach Jim Triemplar expected the race to be won by Snyder or Catanese. “He (Catanese) and Cody have had some tremendous battles and today was Andrew’s day,” Triemplar said. “(This) week it could be something different. But Andrew really looked good today.” 

  Though Snyder was not at 100 percent, Lee-Davis head coach Neil Matthews said his junior runner was not going to use that as an excuse. “Cody finished second today after basically running up front all year and beating these guys so I know he’s very disappointed,” Matthews said. “He’s been fighting a little bit of an injury bug but he wasn’t going to use that as an excuse today. We discussed the option of not running today because of it and he was like, ‘No, I’m going to run and not use that as an excuse.’”

  For the girls it was fantastic freshman Bonny Turnage of Lee-Davis crossing the finish line with no one else in sight and a time of 19:02.55. Hanover junior Anna Gordon took second with a time of 19:31.33. Last year’s winner, senior Stephanie Cario of Lee-Davis, came in third with a time of 19:57.50.

  Though the tiny Turnage has dominated races all season, Matthews said she has yet to show what she can really do. “Bonny’s a very driven individual and she sets her goals very high,” he said. “I think I have yet to see where her limit is for going after it. Just when I think she’s working too hard she goes and does even harder or runs even faster. That’s all in her dedication and drive.”

  Though the team championships did not change hands this season, that does not mean there was not drama deciding the outcome.

  The Lee-Davis boys came in favored to pick up their first title since 2005. However, even though Atlee was not on par with previous years, they were a team that could not be counted out.

  Then there was Hanover; a team that had never finished as high as second in the district but with a talented group of young runners expected to challenge for that mark at this year’s championship.

  Prior to the race, Hanover head coach Cameron Hopper instructed his team to push themselves if they wanted to come home with the best finish in school history. “We told them before they started if there’s one person that they could get past, to try and get past because we knew it was going to be that close,” he said. “We honestly thought it was going to be Lee-Davis that we were really going to go after. We knew Atlee was going to be on the heels and we knew also that (Atlee) Coach Triemplar always seems to be able to pull his team together no matter what they look like during the season and come off with a victory.”

  When all the runners came in, Hanover had achieved its school best second place finish, but more astounding they fell only two points shy of taking first. Atlee won the title with 37 points while Hanover scored 38. Lee-Davis finished third with 49 points and Highland Springs rounded out the teams that will advance to regionals with 120 points.

  Atlee placed three runners in the top four positions, Catanese (1st), Andy Hesse (3rd) and Wes Steenburgh (4th) however Hanover dominated the next 10 slots. The Hawks Baylor Dickerson and Ryan Peterson took fifth and sixth respectively while Lucas Nachman, James Poyer and Michael Goolsby claimed the eight through ten positions. Hanover’s Sam Roser rounded out the Hawks’ top six with a 13th place finish.

  And while everyone was keeping an eye on which individuals came in at the top, the title came down to a race for 12th where Atlee’s Shao-wei Tu beat out Rosser by :00.61 seconds. Along with the Raiders’ Zach Snider (17th), Sean Gardner (18th) and Marques Atkinson (23rd), Triemplar said it was the lower half of the his slate that made the difference. “They did a great job and we got just enough help from Shao-wei Tu and Sean Gardner, Zach Snider and Marques Atkinson, we got just enough help from that group of four to sneak past Hanover.”

  “It was a great race,” Hopper said. “Our guys ran their hearts out. They really, really put everything into it and I think it came down to probably 1/100th 1/200th of a second with our #6 runner just losing to their #4 or #5 runner.

  While Matthews praised the efforts of C-feds Snyder and Robbie Longest, who finished seventh, he said overall his squad was not happy about falling from the first two slots for the first time. “I’m disappointed and I think they’re going to be because they’ve been close before,” he said. “They’ve never been outside of first or second in the district meet and today they were third. It’s got to leave a little bit of a bad taste in their mouth and I’m hoping that it does leave that bad taste so where next week at the region meet they can come back, rebound and run a lot better.”

  The C-feds Travis Dawson finished eleventh while Michael Hoy, John Cario and Brent Goodwin claimed 14th-16th.

  The Lee-Davis girls (21 points) won on the strength of their top runners, following Turnage and Cario, Tiel Westbrook and Amanda Lineberry finished fourth and fifth while Melissa Davis and Samantha Perkins came in eighth and ninth.

  “I thought my girls got the job done today,” Matthews said. “They had this goal in mind all year and this is step one of their goals and that’s to win the district and I think they did it in a nice fashion. We got healthy again at the right time and I thought they ran a pretty good race on a rather warm day.”

  Hampered by the illness bug, Hanover was missing its number one and number five runners, Lauren Hopper and Blake Potts but still scored enough points (52) to claim second.

  “We were happy to hold onto second,” Hopper said. “We’d have had to run our best race with all of our runners healthy to compete with Lee-Davis and we were hoping and looking forward to it but unfortunately we didn’t get the opportunity with our full healthy squad. But they ran a great race too.”

  Hanover seniors Julia Ostendorf and Megan Kalinowski took sixth and seventh while MaryBeth Sciolino, Meredith Hopper and Scott Mackenzie claimed the 19-21 slots.

  The very young Atlee squad turned in a solid performance taking third with 60 points while the Henrico girls claimed fourth with 119.

  Sophomore Katie Bland led the way for Atlee with a 10th place finish while freshman Lindsey Wilkins, sophomore Rebekah Hamlett, and freshmen Paige Harrar, Dezi Bennett and Brittany Engels took the 12th through 16th slots.

  “We were real pleased with how our girls ran,” Triemplar said of his Raiders. “We got a lot more girls to place all district than we would have figured say two weeks ago.”

  Once again, both races were dominated by Hanover county runners. A combined three runners from outside Hanover County finished in the top 20.

  The Sub-varsity races set a precursor for later in the day with the Atlee boys and Lee-Davis girls taking both events.

  The Atlee boys took the Sub-Varsity title while Lee-Davis came in second and Hanover third. The Atlee boys were led by Tom Bavin (2nd) Kyle Loren (4th) and Austin Smith (5th).

  Coach Triemplar said his Sub-varsity squad inspired his varsity team to also win the title. “I think the Sub-varsity job did a great job of setting the table,” Triemplar said. “We talked about that. We wanted to win the Sub-varsity division even though there’s nothing but maybe a warm handshake and pat on the back, but they took a little pride in that as far as setting the tone for the varsity. When they won that it meant a lot to them and hopefully the varsity fed off that.”

  Lee-Davis eighth-grader Paul Adam won the race with a time of 18:38.54. He was followed by teammates Ben White (3rd) and Elliott Hinton (6th).
  Hanover’s Matthew Kellner and Sam Thompson led the Hawks in 13th-14th while Dustyn Vallies came in 16th.

  Lee-Davis dominated the girls Sub-Varsity race placing nine runners in the top 12. Freshman Jennifer Vieni blazed in first with a time of 21:36.66 beating teammate Victoria Doss by nearly a minute. Lauren Blankenship took third for the C-feds.

  Atlee eighth-grader Katie Gardner took third for the Raiders while Katt Grasberger came in sixth and Scarlett Bavin finished eighth.
Running without a full team, Hanover’s Alex Schweiger and Savannah Reeves came in 15th-16th.