Ontario, CA — Please see Team Pages for updates and current information about the team. https://teampages.com/teams/1063519-Los-Osos-Cross-Country-cross-country-running-team-website/announcements Inland Empire Invitational Recap: The Grizzlies entered the final phase of their season by returning to their roots. On an overcast, cool morning, the IE Challenge also returned to it’s roots, and a fun fact, it’s a meet that I have a long connection to in a footnote that probably a handful of people even know and probably wouldn’t remember if asked. So I will show my age with a story from the high school cross country history book that doesn’t exist. In 1986, at the age of 19, after one year of coaching the distance runners in track, I became the head cross country coach at Arlington High School in Riverside. Adding to the stress of being unprepared, I inherited the Arlington Invitational, a 25-30 school invitational held on the same corresponding week as today’s IE Challenge. While that may not sound like a big deal, keep in mind there were no cell phones, no email, and our course, long considered the Mt. SAC of Riverside County, was in the middle of nowhere with no bathrooms and no electricity. This was the era of Jet Mail amongst schools, which was anything but what the name implies, and half the schools that competed today didn’t exist at that time. It was a logistical nightmare, but every year we made it happen, and over the years, the stories I could tell! Unknown to me, a couple of coaches decided to create the Riverside County Championship Meet, which I was happy to support, except they decided instead of putting it on a relatively open weekend in September, they stuck in on the same day as our meet. That forced me to move our meet to the other weekend and the number of schools dropped to a point that it wasn’t worth the amount of work. The County Championships were forced to continually move locations, which drove coaches away as they wanted to be able to run the same course to compare times over the years. San Bernardino County had no such meet and with no open week, a deal was struck to add SB County to the same meet, which saved the Riverside meet and gave SB County something they never had, and it still serves as the County Championships for both counties with the twist of making it a county vs. county competition, hence the “Challenge” in the name. I’m sure we are all better off after reading that, and here’s some additional more recent history. When I took over at Los Osos in 2005, this meet was co-hosted by Los Osos, Rancho Cucamonga, and Canyon Springs. Having lived the good life of not hosting a monster like this for a number of years, and with parents feeling overwhelmed by the responsibilities, we opted out, which the two other schools were all too happy to accept, because it meant profit split two ways instead of three. The meet was held at Guasti Park as was one of our league meets, so we considered it our “home” course for records. Eventually there was a falling out with park management and the meet was moved to Glen Helen, which seems to always have scheduling issues, and so we came home this year, although to a course layout never used before. I think we can all agree that the course was flat and fast with pretty great weather for racing this morning. Focusing on age grouping for the best competition, the Grizzlies were spread out in different races, although down a few runners. Noah Chairez had the chance to show his stuff in the boys sweepstakes race where he finished 12th overall and 7th among runners from San Bernardino County. With no other SB County runners besting his time in the other races, he earns All-County First Team honors, so congratulations to Noah…all that hard work has paid off. In the boys varsity race, Fernando Hernandez and Matthew Ruiz battled all the way to the finish to grab 11th and 12th place respectively. Maverick Chamberlin had a solid race in the sophomore race, finishing 13th, while Adrian Marquez raced to a top 25 finish in the frosh race. For the girls, down 2 runners, it was Evelyn Simon and Hannah Hassan racing well in the varsity race with Evelyn taking 11th and Hannah 16th. Jenna Summers looked good as she finished 9th in the sophomore race, while Emmery Mitchell, who won the most fan support award, had a top 20 finish in the frosh race. Next up for the Grizzlies is the venerable Mt. SAC Invitational next Saturday in Walnut. There’s a little bit of history at that meet too. That will conclude our invitational season as we approach the Baseline League Finals, a meet we co-host with Rancho Cucamonga HS on Tuesday, November 1st at Central Park in town, which I suppose is our home course now. Complete Results: Boys Sweeps (64 runners): 12. Noah Chairez – 15:32 (All-County First Team) Boys Varsity (5th of 8 teams; 75 runners): 11. Fernando Hernandez – 16:34; 12. Matthew Ruiz – 16:35; 33. JJ Johnson – 17:40; 37. Jacob Winter – 17:52; 50. Jonathan Eakle – 18:22 Girls Varsity (48 runners): 11. Evelyn Simon – 20:18; 16. Hannah Hassan – 20:25; 28. Brigitte Sanchez – 21:20 Boys Sophs (9th of 11 teams; 114 runners): 13. Maverick Chamberlin – 17:09; 61. Brayden Cox – 18:41; 73. Kyle Thomas – 19:21; 74. Ben Gasparian – 19:23; 85. John Luck – 20:40; 102. Nathan Torres – 22:47 Girls Sophs (66 runners): 9. Jenna Summers – 20:25; 45. Briana Arias – 24:24 Boys Frosh (88 runners): 21. Adrian Marquez – 18:15; 33. Troy Trask – 18:52; 69. Nathan Lee – 21:00 Girls Frosh (61 runners): 17. Emmery Mitchell – 22:46