The Bellwood-Antis boys cross country team officially won the Mountain Conference Class AA championship on Tuesday by defeating Lewistown on the losers corse 26-30.
Aaron Bell was the top finisher for Bellwood-Antis (11-1) with an overall second place finish in 17:28. Will Edwards (fifth in 18:11) and Kyle Shiffler (eighth in 18:21) also cracked the top 10. Four schools ran in the match, but Bellwood-Antis had already run against Juniata Valley and Indian Valley earlier in the season.
B-A coach Julie Roseborough wanted to wait until the Lewistown match was completed, but though the title was guaranteed with last week’s win over Indian Valley.
“We had it won last week,” explained coach Roseborough, “ but we wanted to get this one won before we did a lot of celebrating. The Fultz kid is a really good runner for Lewistown and Aaron Bell stayed with him the entire race finishing one 12 seconds behind. Will Edwards really stepped it up for this race and Kyle Shiffler ran a good race as well. Most of our boys ran their personal bests put there against Lewistown. The relatively flat course was to their liking. The guys could have packed it in, with nothing on the line with the title already in the bag. Instead their considered it a matter of pride and went out and ran their best. We finished against Penns Valley, Indian Valley and Lewistown in our last three meets. We probably couldn’t have set up the schedule any better. Those three schools are strong every year in cross country, to defeat each of them in turn, is really a tribute to this year’s team.”
The Bellwood-Antis girls team lost to Lewistown 15-50 and Juniata Valley 15-50. Lady Blue Devil junior Allison Cherry posted the best time of 20:58, finishing first overall as the girls cross country team fell to 4-8.
“We still have girls nursing injuries and that has realy hurt us the last part of the schedule,” said Roseborough. “Allison ran a very smart race staying just behind Katie Wecko, a state qualifier for Juniata Valley and the Fetter girl from Lewistown until about the two-mile mark where she made her move. Allison then pulled away and held her lead for the remainder of the race. Each of the girls ran her personal best, but again with the injuries, lack of numbers really killed us.”
The next action for the B-A crooss country teams will be Wednesday Oct. 16 when they travel to Indian Valley for the Mountain Lerague Meet.
