flrunners.com visited with the Newsome High School cross country team out of the eastern portion of Hillsborough County in Lithia for this week's Workout Wednesday shoot.
The workout included the team running 5 x 800 meter repeats at 85% effort with roughly 3 minutes recovery on a nearby powerlines loop with a slight and gradual incline for the athletes to charge up and then roll down to finish the loop.
Both girls and boys teams are competitively strong in the 4A classification as state qualifiers from a year ago (girls 2nd and boys 9th) with the girls' team among several teams in contention to win a state title which would be their second title in three years if able to achieve come November in Tallahassee. The boys' team has already been ranked among the top 15 in the state with their early-season performances.
The structure of the squad is unique compared to most teams and has worked for a while with two head coaches separately leading the two teams with Orlando Greene as the girls head coach and Brian Sears as the boys head coach.
The duo is now entering a third decade at Newsome working with one another well and supporting the other as another voice for their athletes. Greene is a notable name as he was actually an Olympian in the 1976 Montreal Games competing at 800 meters for his home country of Barbados with a 1:46 lifetime best PR.
The Newsome girls have an entire top 7 varsity lineup already running in the 20-minute range or faster this season led by Megan Wells at 18:55, who was a fifth-place All-State finisher in last year's 4A state cross country race. Wells is expected to be another single-digit point scorer up front once again in all their meets this fall.
Wells and fellow seniors Kendall Hughes and Anika Shah as the team's top three runners have plenty of state meet experience being part of Newsome's string of state meet success dating back several years of finishing no worse than third place at the state meet. All three were part of the 2019 state champion squad.
Hughes has become more of a middle-distance star including a 2:16 best for 800 meters and the wheels to go under 60 seconds in the open 400 but has shown the range to run up to 5K distance including a 19:04 5K season-best. Shah, a top 50 finisher in last year's state meet, has also ventured in the 19 minute range this season as their #3 runner with a 19:45 personal best and had a solid sixth-place showing at the Lecanto Invite in her last race.
Jason Swartzlander is the top runner for the Newsome boys and has already broken 16 minutes this season with his 15:59 victory at the East Hillsborough Invite in his season debut. The Newsome boys took runner-up honors as a team at the Lecanto Invite behind only highly ranked Sunlake before enjoying victory again this past weekend at the Don Bishop Invite in Brandon with Wade LaRue (3rd) and Swartzlander (4th) helping lead them to a victory by over 70 points.
LaRue is a solid #2 runner with a 16:32 season-best and ran just over 10 minutes for 3200 meters in the spring. After Swartzlander and LaRue, Newsome has a large squad including a pack of guys in the 17-minute range ready to move up to make them even more competitive later in the season.
After competing in smaller or mid-sized invitationals for the month of September, the Newsome squad is prepping for their first major meet of the season in the flrunners.com Invitational on October 2nd at Holloway Park in Lakeland.