Sep. 22—EDDYVILLE — Class 1A No. 7 Greenlee Smock will look to grab her third straight state medal next month.
For now, she’s just trying to win races. And she claimed her second victory of the season on Tuesday, winning the girls’ 5K at the EBF Invitational.
Smock and James Gruver both claimed top-10 finishes at the Hawks’ only meet of the week. Gruver placed sixth in the boys’ 5K race.
“We were excited to get some cooler weather after how warm it has been lately,” L-S cross country coach Darin Arkema said. “This meet is pretty similar to our home meet and the Pleasantville meet as far as it being runners from mostly 1A and 2A schools.”
Smock’s win in the girls’ race was clocked at 20 minutes, 34 seconds. In five races this season, Smock has two wins, two second-place finishes and a fourth.
“I thought this was a race Greenlee could get to the front of pretty early on and take control. However, a couple girls got away from the start line hard and Greenlee held back,” Arkema said. “By the halfway point, she was in the lead and never relinquished it.”
The L-S girls placed seventh as a team in the nine-team field with 274 points. Class 2A No. 10 Albia (84) edged 1A No. 3 Pekin (86) for the team title and 1A No. 14 Central Decatur (139), 1A No. 15 Montezuma (143) and Cardinal (239) completed the top five. Wayne (245), L-S, Pleasantville (308) and Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont (312) were the other full teams.
Olivia Norrish returned from injury to placed 29th with a time of 24:53. The rest of the varsity runners included Kendra Fikse (26:28) in 47th, Kinsley Tice (26:38) in 48th, Callista Hackert (27:57) in 59th, Corrina Rozendaal (28:11) in 62nd and Brooke Conover (28:26) in 64th.
The L-S boys had four runners for this meet. Gruver’s sixth-place finish was clocked in 18:18. Zach Morningstar was 12th in 19:04, Vance Scholten (23:48) placed 55th and Evan Fikse (25:47) was 65th.
“A small group of four or five runners got out hard and built a decent lead in front of the next pack,” Arkema said. “James and Zach were left in the second tier of runners to try and make up ground and were contending for much of the race for the remaining spots in the top 10. I still need to work with these two on getting mile splits to be more even rather than a fast first mile and then a fade to a slower second mile and an even slower third mile.”