Despite the heavy rain this week, Prairie Valley was still able to host its cross country on meet on Sept. 26.

It was a smaller meet with a little more than 20 runners in the boys and girls races. This made every place count that much more and motivate each runner to push themselves every bit they could to try and beat the runner in front of them.

The Bulldog boys team finished second overall as a team and had the top finisher of the race, with last year’s state qualifier William Winler running a season best 18:37, beating second place by more than 30 seconds.

Other top finishers for Prairie Valley included Kaden Fleming in seventh place, Tyler Reid in eighth place, Isaac Yeargin in 12th place and Zak Smith in 15th place.
Coach Seth Stephens was pleased with how much better his boys ran from their first meet the previous week.

“All of my high school guys ran their best time of the year,” Stephens said.

The coach said it turned out to be a beautiful day after concerns the meet might get rained out.

“Not running in 95 degree heat definitely helped us I think, but our guys also are working hard at getting better. Their times are getting faster in practice as well. It was good to see Kaden Fleming bounce back this week. He had a rough week last week, he ran on a hurt ankle. This week it was feeling better and he ran 20:28. Of course it was good to see William win the gold. I’m really excited about seeing how our team continues to do moving forward.”

The girls team also finished second. Their top two runners finished close to each other at the top of the standings as Cosima Ermert finished second with a time of 14:37 while Allie Brown finished not too far behind her in third with at time of 14:48. The rest of the team saw Taylor Franklin finish 11th, Veronica Gutierrez 16th and Randi Gilleland 21st.

Read the full story in the weekend edition of The Bowie News.