South of England CC Champs: Young Athletes

The course at Parliament Hill is always expected to be hard and is usually wet and heavy-going although the sodden nature of the course in recent years was mitigated somewhat by the drying effect of the north-easterly wind over the past week. This however, left a couple of sections of very sticky mud, on the downhill parts of which it even made keeping upright difficult. The reactions of our young athletes after the Saturday’s South of England Cross Country Championships reflected the hard nature of the course and the effects of the chilling wind.

With a number of athletes missing through injury or illness, we only succeeded in fielding scoring teams in the U13 and U15 Girls events but our lack of strength in depth meant that we were unable to’t mount any challenge in these races. On the individual front, we had some highly respectable placings although the strength of the competition underlined the difficulty of translating good league or county results into good regional results.

The best placings of the day (as a percentage of the winner’s time) came from Alex Cornwell (28^th) and Omar Mansour (32^nd) in the U20M event, but prospects of a team medal disappeared when an out-of-sorts Ronnie Sparke packed during the first lap followed by Darren Southcott (knee injury) at the start of the second lap. Whilst Alex and Omar were expected to run well, U15G Amelia Barrett has been making quiet and determined progress this winter and her 33^rd placing from the field of 209 finishers underlined this and it ensured that she picked up maximum points in the Frank Webb Trophy rankings.

Other individual results of note were James Stockings’ 34^th in the U17M race, Daniel Rowden’s 42^nd (and our only runner) in the U13B race and Perry Rowan’s 106^th (our only runner here too) in the largest junior race of the day, the U15B field of 262. Although Perry was disappointed afterwards, he was only a shade over 2 minutes behind the winner and the runners were streaming in at a little over one a second. Nicking a few metres back here and there round the course can make a huge difference to a finishing place in this sort of race.

Our leading U13G runner, Alicia McArdell (64^th) also gave a good account of herself as our first runner home (and 5^th Essex runner); here our team finished 25^th (3^rd Essex Team) with Alicia supported by Jodi Ratcliffe (114^th), Rosie Poole (151^st) with Katherine Myers (238^th) and Niamh Bartlett (239^th) only separated by 4 seconds towards the back of the field.

In the U17M event, Liam Blaikie (73^rd) looked disappointed for his efforts, with Ryan Dunne behind him in 96^th. We also managed to field a full team in the U15G race where, behind Amelia Barrett, we had a closely packed group of Isobel Moss (154^th), Stephanie Smith (157^th) and Lucy Hayes (159^th) who closed the team in 21^st place with Billie Bradley (193^rd) and Jessica Edwards (208^th) supporting.

Our U20W Team was deprived of Kate Stockings whose sore throat prevented her running but could nonetheless be heard giving her teammates some hoarse vocal support out on the course. Sidnie Sales, in her first U20 winter, was a creditable 26^th, with Claudia Conway (36^th) and Becky Hewitt (47^th) following her home. In the U17W’s race, last year’s winner Aldershot’s Emelia Gorecka ran home ahead of Chelmsford’s Jessica Judd (last year’s U15 winner and our U17 county champion); a little further back, our pair of Lauren Freeman (114^th) and Holly Bedeau (116^th) were both relieved to finish having missed quite a bit of training recently.

These Championships also doubled as our club championships and the following won club medals (to be presented at the Young Athletes’ Awards Evening on Tuesday 8^th February after training):

The Frank Webb Trophy rankings have also been updated following the Southern Championships and with two more qualifying races to go, the outcome is still uncertain with a closely packed group of eight or so athletes still in contention