Cardinals look to District 7 race after regular season

Medical Lake head cross country coach Gene Blankenship hopes the league schedule he helped craft does not come back to bite him and his teams.

The showdown for the Northeast A League boys’ regular season title between a pair of undefeated teams — Medical Lake and Deer Park, both 5-0 — which occurred this past Tuesday, Oct. 18, comes on the heels of two dominating, but easy league wins for the Cardinals.

“Unfortunately we’ve had two easy league meets in a row, now we have to go against the big one,” Blankenship said, referring to the head-to-had with the Stags. “I would have preferred to have a hard dual meet to test us a little bit,” he said of wins over Newport, 15-47, Freeman 19-42 and 16-44 against Chewelah.

Blankenship likes the progress he’s seen in his team since the No. 1 ranked Stags and No. 6 Cardinals met for the first time at the season-opening race in Moses Lake.

From the first to the second meeting with Deer Park in the invitationals, “We’ve seen tremendous improvement,” Blankenship said. “Hopefully that will be the same situation where we’ll see (continued) improvement against Deer Park.”

Last Wednesday in a meet that featured Freeman and Chewelah, Medical Lake collected four of the top five finishes in the boys, led by Mason Williams’ 17 minute, 13 second time. Brandon McCoy was second at 17:44. A full list of Cardinal finishers can be found in the West Plains scoreboard.

“The kids ran pretty good, but we were split up too much,” Blankenship said.

In the girls’ race, won by Freeman 27-30 and Chewelah, 20-39, Else Longhurst of Freeman topped the finishers in a time of 20:22. Riley Olmstead of Medical Lake was third in a time of 21:33, and was followed by Mariah Pena’s 21:44.

Regardless of Tuesday’s results, Blankenship is looking ahead to next Thursday, Oct. 27 where runners will converge on the Chewelah Golf Course for district competition and the route to state the following week in Pasco.

The top three finishers will send teams to state, and Blankenship, who has been much more guarded in predictions, said that the times his boys havee run in invitational meets has him somewhat optimistic they will be one of those teams.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.