On Tuesday afternoon in Tampa, 18 schools gathered to compete at the TRC Rogers Park Invitational hosted by HB Plant High School.
It would be the hosts in the Plant boys and girls both coming away as team champions with the boys executing a packing running strategy thru the first two miles before letting their top runners Ryan Maney and Albert Tawil-Brown take off for the final mile, while the girls team kept their spread under a minute with five finishers among the top 20 places.
The first individual finisher across the line in the boys' race for his first victory of the season after plenty of strong top 5 finishes in several large invitationals was Alonso senior Raekwon Hopkins. While hoping to have Maney and Tawil-Brown to push him, Hopkins instead had to set the pace throughout alone up in the front en route to a wire to wire 16:07 victory for his second-fastest time on the season.
After laying back and trying to pull along their teammates thru the first two-thirds of the race, Maney and Tawil-Brown took off the last mile and really made up a lot of ground on the gap that existed between them and Hopkins to run times of 16:16 (Maney) and 16:19 (Tawil-Brown) respectively.
Plant is definitely one on of the better teams in the 4A classification after the favorites from Viera and showed it on Tuesday taking 6 of the top 11 places as beyond their stout top 2 had Ashton Stringer (5th, 16:54), Michael Gonzalez (8th, 17:13), Michael DiFranco (10th, 17:32), and George Dirks (11th, 17:32) all running well. The Plant boys finished with 26 points and a team average under 17 minutes at 16:51 to put them well ahead of the next closest squad in the Hopkins-led Alonso boys with 65 points.
For the Plant girls, it was a pair of seniors finishing right together with Arlie Rubin in 20:24 for sixth place and Penelope Markowski in 20:25 for seventh place leading the way to their team victory. The rest of their scoring five came thru the finish chute under 60 seconds from there with Margaret Malizia (14th, 20:58), Kristin Keyser (18th, 21:08), and Kyra Taylor (20th, 21:23).
The Plant girls with a winning team score of 65 points had a bit more closer challengers than their boys' counterparts with Academy of Holy Names (2nd, 82 pts) and Wharton (3rd, 83 pts) all having a top 5 team average under 21 minutes as well.
Coming into the meet, the girls' race looked to be a battle up front between two elite runners ranked among the top 10 in the state between Wharton's Brooke Reif and Palm Harbor University's Haley Thornton coming off sub 19 minute races at North Port two weekends ago, but former middle school and age group track star Elizabeth Williamson decided she wanted to become a high school star as well. Last spring, Williamson ran a 5:08 mile as an eighth-grader and was a third-place finisher in last fall's FLYRA Middle School State Cross Country Championships.
The ninth-grader now at Academy of Holy Names, Williamson sat back with Reif after Thornton got out fast thru the first mile, but then worked her way up to Thornton with Reif on the second loop and by the two mile mark on the 5K course at the Rogers Park Golf Course. When the first runner appeared on the final home stretch, it was Williamson all alone and a 20-second buffer on the next runner in Reif to win in a new 5K personal best time of 18:54. Reif would finish second in 19:14, while Thornton would come in third place with a time of 19:27.
The freshman Williamson definitely could be someone to watch in the 2A classification state race later this season after beating two runners on Tuesday who could be in contention for the 4A state title later this year in Reif and Thornton.