This fall sports season had the boys’ cross-country team send two of their athletes to state, Mason Strasser and Blake Roberts. In preparation for the state course, both trained hard with their coaches, “We started doing less intense stuff but maintaining the workouts we been doing up until that point. [Practiced] pretty much every day of the week, minus Sunday,” Strasser said.

Guiding them was their head coach, David Weed. “Seen a lot of improvement over the season, from where they started, each of them are running pretty significantly faster than when they started this season. They’re both returning athletes so it’s a big improvement from where they were at the end of last year.” Weed said. 

One of the athletes running the state course is Mason Strasser. Mason is a junior and running the state course for the second time. “Excited to be going back to run the race. This whole week been drinking a lot and eating a lot. They’re great [coaches], they’ve been helping me focus on what to look for to race the state race. Pretty confident but the schools this year have been pretty fast, we’ll see what happens.”  

On Nov. 9, our grizzlies competed in the state contest, alongside 158 other athletes. Our runners finished the 5000m course placing 44 with a time of 16:16.1 and 33 with a time of 16:04.5. Last year, Mason Strasser’s time was 17:09.0 and Blake Robert’s was 16:24.3. Strasser was our athlete who placed 44th. ”State is awesome. I loved it. It was super fun being with the coaches and my teammate. And working on trying to get back there again next year,” Strasser said.