Inside Sports: Cross Country Freeze Out for the Home Opener Meet?

The HMS track team had a great season this past fall with many victories celebrated and a few defeats along the way. Now that it has come to an end, many athletes have time to sit back, and recall certain games, races, and plays they experienced during the fall sports season.

For the HMS Cross Country team members, one memorable moment was a very cold and uncomfortable HMS Cross Country home meet a few weeks ago where the team suffered a devastating loss.

What many theorized happened was that an opposing Delsea Middle School attempted to “freeze us out” by being concerningly late to the meet and taking an unusually long time to warm up. Mind you, they arrived on a heated bus while we, the track team, waited out in the cold: which makes your muscles weak and sore…which weakens running abilities. Did they do this on purpose? Were the runner times impacted?

In this event, not only the runners noticed this plot, some of the fans in attendance questioned the race, too. One spectator, Caroline Fallon, said “I thought we were an hour late, but we were actually 10 minutes early!” You can clearly see the opposing team was taking their time.

Sometimes before a race, the teams will walk the course to familiarize themselves, but considering how late they were, we didn’t expect that to happen, but Delsea did in fact ask to walk the course. As for our team, it seemed like nobody was happy with their times that day. Kiera Coda, a 6th grader on the team (and my twin sister) said, “I was definitely slower that day.”

It definitely was not our best showing.