Throughout the fall, the Sant Bani School cross country team trains to achieve peak performance at the culminating event: the State Championship meet. The 2021 season concluded with the State Meet on Saturday, October 23 at Coe-Brown Northwood Academy. Competing in Division IV, Sant Bani School runners raced against athletes from 14 other schools, entering runners in the Girls Non-Scoring, Girls Scoring, and Boys Non-Scoring races.
SBS eighth graders Elli Englund and Jakai Gage paced the Swans, each finishing in second place in their respective races. Englund finished second out of 102 runners in the Girls Scoring race, helping SBS to a fourth place finish out of 13 teams, just six points behind third-place Nottingham School. Gage placed second out of 57 runners in the Boys Non-Scoring race, eight seconds behind the race winner but nearly 30 seconds ahead of the third-place finisher. Nathaniel Colon was the School’s only other entrant in the Boys Non-Scoring race.
As she has done all season, Englund led the Sant Bani School girls squad throughout the race and finished with a season-best time of 13:01 on the two-mile course. Eloise Abbott was the next SBS finisher in 13th place, followed by Casey Pietroniro, Ellis Pietroniro, and Anna Warzocha. Sydney Conklin and Suzy Brand also ran in the Girls Scoring race and were Sant Bani School’s sixth and seventh finishers; each team’s top-five runners contribute to the overall team score in cross country. In sum, Sant Bani School’s team score was 122 (the place in which one finishes is the number that contributes to the team score).
In the Girls Non-Scoring race, Sophie Jarvis, Inaya Robinson-Wood, Adia Robinson-Wood, and Carol Lupien competed for SBS.
In the end, all 13 Sant Bani School runners achieved the goal of peaking at the State Meet, as all 13 ran their fastest times of the season.