Back in August, the course for the 2017 provincial high school cross country championship didn’t even exist.
Thanks to some hard work from the students and staff of Turtleford Community School, along with people in the town, everything was put into place for the event that took place Saturday.
“Another teacher and I mapped out the course in early August and we got the town on side by building the bridge over Turtle River,” Turtleford Community School and event organizer Laurel Derenoski said.
“We had some machinery go through to make the trail in the push and my Grade 8 class spent a lot of time in the bushes behind the school to help get everything finalized.”
With 575 athletes from 160 schools competing in six different divisions, the challenges that the course presented proved to be different from many of the events that have taken place around the province.
“Typically, most of the trails are generally flat and there are some meets that take place on golf courses,” Derenoski said.
“We wanted to get away from that and make a true cross country running courses with a variety of elevation changes and different terrain.”
With a number of coaches from other schools and representives from the Saskatchewan High Schools Athletic Association singing the praises of how well the event went, there has been some talk of Turtleford hosting the event again as soon as next year.
However, Derenoski was quick to point out that it might not happen that quickly.
“We’d like to do it again for sure, but there’s a lot of demanding work that goes in behind the scenes,” Derenoski said.
“We would want to make sure that our staff here in the school and the volunteers in the community want to be involved again. If we get into a situation where this is on a regular basis, we don’t want to burn everyone out.”
The top finishers from the area were Lashburn’s Dawson Smith, who placed fourth in the midget boys division, and John Paul II Collegiate’s Taylor Parker from North Battleford, who had a fifth place result in the junior boys race.
The midget titles went to Adam Mytopher of Strasbourg and Avery Perason from Jonas Samson Junior High in Meadow Lake.
Zoe Flaman of Yorkton and Benjamin Seshadri of Saskatoon Centennial captured the junior championships, while the senior racers were won by Weyburn’s Kaitlyn Harrison and Strasbourg’s Brayden Mytopher.
