Team takes 1st place in last regular meet

By Andrew Atallah ’10
THE ROUNDUP

As their season wraps up, the Brophy Cross Country team looked to finish strong at regionals Oct. 28, and state in early November.

The end of the season comes as a culmination to the success of the seven varsity runners: Matt Xuereb ’10, Gabe Campbell ’10, Patrick Wolf ’11, Jack Welty ’12, Brock Ghelfi ’12, Tommy Williams ’11 and Will Firth ’11.

The whole cross country team ran all summer and currently practices six days a week during the hottest part of the year in order to do their best.

These runners can often be seen leaving Brophy after school, working hard when most students head home to relax.

Their hard work has paid off all season as they are always improving, staying near the top of pack in all their meets.

In the recent Desert Twilight Cross Country Festival in Queen Creek Brophy finished third beating Desert Vista, the defending state champions, said coach Mr. Andy Schmidbauer ’88.

Cross Country is scored differently than most sports. Rather than trying to accumulate points, teams win by having the least amount of points in a competition.

The higher each runner places in a competition the less points he earns, so the team that wins the meet has the least amount of points.

On Saturday Oct. 17, the Cross Country team won their last meet of the regular season, the O’Connor/Denison invitational, and Firth placed 2nd in the competition.

Going into the end of the regular season Mr. Schmidbauer said he feels very good about the team this year and that they are looking much better than they did last year.

With only two seniors on varsity, cross country will also have a very strong team next year and can hope for two strong back to back seasons.

Although cross country teams are not officially ranked until the end of the season Mr. Schmidbauer said he places Brophy’s team in third place just behind Alhambra High School and Mountain View High School.