girls championship team race - girls championship individual race - girls division 1

boys championship team race - boys championship individual race - boys division 1

Meet Summary

On a day that began with the crisp temperatures one expects from October cross country and ended feeling more like a late summer afternoon, Blue Lake Park in Gresham, Oregon and Aloha Coach Tim Tank hosted over 3000 runners in 12 races at the 27th Nike/Jim Danner Invitational. All along the sprawling start line, teams with their sights set on this name-making meet huddled in tight clusters, exchanging final words of encouragement, fist taps and team cheers. Then it was into the box and the long, edgy wait for the gun.

The big winners in the NW Championship races were the NW#1 Ferris WA boys, who set a meet record with their 58 points, and the girls from Saugus CA, who confirmed their CA#3 ranking with a narrow 6-point win over a determined NW#1 West Valley AK squad (81-87). Individually, Saugus’ Shannon Murakami ran away with the girl’s NW Championship race (her 17:43.87 the 4th fastest ever on this course), and Seattle Prep’s Max O’Donoghue-McDonald won a stirring battle with Kentwood WA’s Michael Chinchar, pulling away for the 5th fastest time recorded on the Danner course—15:08.15.

Girls NW Championship Race - Team

Bringing the Kenyans to Nike Team Nationals is one thing, but the girls from West Valley are working hard to make sure meet organizers don’t forget about the Alaskans. Saugus CA, who beat them by six points Saturday, is just hoping to win their first league championship next month. Both teams took a step in the right direction with their indelible duel in the girl’s Northwest Championship race.

Saugus had the early upper hand—halfway through the race it was clear their team would be starting with a single point off Shannon Murakami’s dominant run (1st 17:43). From there things got a little tighter. West Valley, transferring tactics which won the Alaska state meet last week, bided their time and established a grinding, consistent pace that found them passing fading runners late in the race.

“We went out controlled and were trying not to get too excited,” West Valley’s #1 Samantha Davis said after the race, “and then just keep it going...keep passing people...move up throughout.”

“We were trying to catch as many people as we could see,” second runner Maggie Callahan added.

They caught a lot of them. Seemingly out of the race at the halfway point, the West Valley girls moved up to challenge Jesuit OR, Carondolet CA, and eventually, Saugus. Coming down the homestretch it was clear the West Valley girls had marked off their opponents and were trying to run them down. “The blues and the greens,” West Valley #4 Becca Rorabaugh said, “we were going after Jesuit and Saugus.”

The team that slipped their attention was previously-ranked Carondolet CA, quietly getting up for third behind the efforts of individual runner-up Nicole Hood (17:57).

“It was a tough race,” Saugus coach Rene Paragas said, awaiting the final scores. “We’re in the middle of our season, whereas West Valley, I know, is toward the end of their season...it was a really, really tight race...probably a little more than we were ready for. They’re a really good team.”

Saugus is pretty good itself. Ranked CA#3 coming in, they backed up that ranking (and their convincing win at Woodbridge) with their victory here. Now they just have to take care of their first league title.

“We’re shooting to peak for our state championship,” Coach Paragas said, “but we haven’t even won a title in our league yet. So we’re looking to start with winning our first league title. NTN is kind of in the background...it’s in the back of our minds, but it’s not one of our immediate goals.”

With their season essentially over, Nike Team Nationals is the only goal West Valley has left at this point. Their previous #1, Crystal Pitney, did not travel south with the team to Jim Danner, and they still came close to the win here.

“It was a great day for us,” West Valley coach Doug Herron said. “We started out a little farther back than we wanted, but the girls stayed composed and ran awesome down the stretch. If they had started a little farther up we may have actually pulled off the upset. But they did great.”

Other ranked teams: NW#2 Jesuit OR girls finished 4th with 151 points, beating out a resurgent NW#6 Boise squad (5th 179). NW#10 Thomas Jefferson WA 6th (221), NW#5 Snohomish WA 8th (223), NW#9 Squalicum WA was 11th (281).

Girls NW Championship Race – Individual

Traveling to Oregon from Southern California for the first time, girl’s NW Championship race winner Shannon Murakami considered herself, ironically enough, the underdog.

“I was really nervous before [the race],” she said, catching her breath, “because I didn’t know who anyone was, the other girls. It was kind of nice being the underdog.”

Impressive run for an underdog. Passing the mile leading in 5:26, Murakami never looked back, cruising past 2 miles in 11:26 and churning to a 14-second victory over fellow Californian Nicole Hood from Carondolet.

Despite losing contact with Murakami after the mile, Hood was pleased with her showing. “I thought the race went pretty well,” she said, “I got out fast at the start and just kept going. I heard people cheering for the girl behind me [Squalicum’s Bronwyn Crossman], so that motivated me to keep going. I got my best time.”

Murakami is coming off a summer in which she hit 70 to 80 miles per week and mentored younger sister Amber into being Saugus’ #2 runner (10th here, 18:29). As a southern California girl, she appreciated the warmth when the clouds gave way to sun in the afternoon.

“When the sun came out it was like, ‘Yes! It’s going to be hot...these are my conditions.’”

They certainly were.

Boys NW Championship - Team

Here’s what racing in Washington’s Greater Spokane League—arguably the most competitive boy’s league in the country—does for you: it makes you tougher.

Just ask NW#6 Central Valley WA coach James Berry, whose squad mowed down several higher-ranked teams to finish second in the boys NW Championship race. “If you want to be up there in the GSL, you’ve got to be one of the better teams in the nation. Every week we’re going up against somebody. We see Ferris, what? Four times this season? We see Mead next Wednesday. It’s never an easy week in the GSL.”

Or ask fellow GSL coach Mike Hadway, whose US#1 Ferris WA boys set a meet record for team score with 58 points. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. For years I’m behind Pat Tyson, who was an icon—I just think it helps you build a bigger program with higher expectations. It builds better competition.”

Or Ferris’ Pat Maloney, whose 23rd place, fifth-man showing closed the door on the Ferris win. “You’ve got great competition every week. You don’t have to travel far away or anything.”

Ferris...Mead...North Central...Central Valley...all ranked in the NW top 10 at some point this season; all in the same Spokane city league. It makes for difficult Wednesdays and interesting Saturdays. Here, Ferris and Central Valley were the only teams with two runners in the top ten—David Hickerson (4th- 15:19) and Steve Olsen (7th-15:35) for Ferris, and Sean Coyle (6th-15:32) and Tylor Thatcher (8th-15:36) for Central Valley. That got each off to a great start and resulted in a 1-2 finish for the GSL teams.

Ferris, as expected, was dominant; their 5 were in the top 23 and separated by 41 seconds in the large field, though Coach Hadway wasn’t sure how they’d respond after the Stanford meet last weekend.

“Coming off of Stanford we were a little nervous, with back-to-back big meets like this. We made a statement at Stanford, so now [the question] was could we uphold what we did? They were a little flat today...a little tired, so it was kind of a test for us.”

Central Valley, trying to nail down second place, had a test as well. Borah ID, Central Catholic OR, and Jesuit OR were all having strong (though not outstanding) races, and were making things tight for the 2-5 team slots.

“We did think we had a shot at Borah and Central Catholic,” CV Coach James Berry said, “Borah’s a lot better than I thought they were at the beginning of the season. We knew it was going to be tight, but we thought we had a legitimate shot at it...our #3 guy had a slightly below par race, but we got a great race out of our top two. Sean [Coyle] really stepped up.”

In the announced results, NW#3 Borah bettered NW#4 Central Catholic by 5 points for 3rd place, but questions arose Saturday evening. Video footage seemed to confirm that Central Catholic’s #1, Taylor Morgan, finished 13th and not the 19th attributed to him in the results. Morgan collapsed in the chaotic chute shortly after finishing, which may account for the discrepancy. With Morgan placing 13th, Borah’s second runner Sean Huey is moved back from 17th to 18th, and Central Catholic appears to take third, 148-149, over Borah. Although it’s unclear whether the outcome will be reversed, there is no question these two teams are closely matched.

After Borah and Central Catholic came an impressive mirroring of the NW ranking progression: NW#8 Jesuit OR was 5th (169), NW#9 Seattle Prep WA was 6th (175), and NW#10 Kodiak AK was 7th (209).

Boys NW Championship - Individual

“Heads up!” one of the finish line workers shouted, “They’re side-by-side, two-hundred meters out!”

As the chute crew scrambled to prepare for a tight finish, Kentwood WA’s Michael Chinchar and Seattle Prep’s Max O’Donoghue-McDonald came into view around the curve of the long homestretch. Shoulder-to-shoulder, they were waging a grim closing battle for the boy’s NW Championship win. Chinchar pulled ahead slightly a hundred meters out, but then O’Donoghue-McDonald surged back, rising and squaring his long, lean frame toward the line. With fifty meters to go, Chinchar’s head wobbled and then dropped; O’Donoghue-McDonald had broken him. The Seattle Prep star surged home to win in 15:08, with Chinchar collapsing across the line in 15:11.

“My plan was to catch the lead pack at 1k,” O’Donoghue-McDonald said afterward, “but it just so happened I was almost in the lead at 1k, so [after that] it was just keep the lead. I knew these guys had put in the training just like I did.”

O’Donoghue-McDonald pulled a tight pack through a quick opening mile in 4:42, and then strung things out a bit through the 2 mile in 9:51. Chinchar was still there, and so was a less-heralded Washington runner, Mt. Rainier’s Ryan Prentice. Prentice weathered a gutsy stretch run of his own against Ferris’ David Hickerson and took a surprising 3rd (15:18) in what he called “a big breakthrough year.”

“I didn’t know if I could hold [Hickerson] off after I got past him. The only thing I was thinking was, ‘Go as fast as you can and don’t give up.’ ”

Prentice was thrilled with his third place finish, as was O’Donoghue-McDonald with his win.

At Stanford last weekend he placed second in an extremely fast race, but O’Donoghue-McDonald confirmed, “Winning’s a lot better. I was pumped with the [Stanford] time, but I know exactly where I lost the race there. It was in my mind the whole week.”

Asked whether he has a nickname that might stand in for his lengthy moniker, O’Donoghue-McDonald laughed and said that when he was a freshman all the guys on Seattle Prep’s team called him “Joker.” “I think it was because I didn’t look like I was going fast, even though I was.”

With the season he’s having so far, no one’s calling him Joker anymore.

Girls Division 1

From the moment the girls swept through the first curve of the course and dropped from the treeline to the flat, Sherwood’s diminutive Ilsa Paulson was in control of the race. She clocked 5:42 through the mile, already well up on Seattle Prep’s Laura Sauvage (2nd 18:54), and cruised home from there. The only remaining question as she glided down the homestretch was how her winning time of 18:33—twenty seconds clear of the field—would stack up against the Girls NW Championship. On paper, it would have placed her 12th in the elite race, an outcome that may have been different if she’d had others to run with.

In the team competition, Columbia River’s 109 point win led a 1-2-3-4 Washington showing, with Auburn-Riverside runners-up (140), followed by Capital (142), and Bishop Blanchet (150).

Boys Division 1

With less than a mile to go, Lakes runner Seth Bridges made what looked to be the definitive move in the Boys Division 1 race. Surging powerfully through a slight dip in the path that splits the Danner loop in half, he put 15 meters on a pack that held Edmonds-Woodway’s Yonaton Yilma, Bishop Kelly’s Paul Sartin, and Phoenix’s Elliott Jantzer. A half mile later it was a different story. “I was going for it until pretty much the end,” Bridges gasped in a post-race interview, “but around the corner to the final sprint my legs just folded.” Yilma and Sartin took advantage, followed by Jantzer. “I didn’t think I could get him,” Yilma said afterwards, “but we came around the flags and he was right there.” The Edmonds-Woodway junior and BK’s Sartin went for it, linked side-by-side the final 50 meters before Yilma edged past for the win, 15:57 to 15:58. Jantzer closed hard for third over a spent Bridges.

In the team battle, yet another talented Spokane, WA crew—West Valley WA—came away with a 136 to 184 win over Kelso WA. Jackson WA was only two points back, at 186, for third.

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