Season’s Outlook:
Although in the past there has been a rich tradition of female distance running at SJCC, during the last few years the SJCC Women’s Cross country Program had fallen on hard times. For several years there had been only the occasional solitary participant. (An official Cross Country team consists of from five to seven runners.) In the Fall of 2004 two retired high school track coaches, Coach Bob Flores and Coach Monty Steadman, took over the women’s program at SJCC in attempt at rebuild it in to a viable community college program.
After recruiting several incoming Freshmen and after advertising on the both the SJCC and EVC campuses, a group of female runners was assembled. Seven ladies whose ages ranged from 18 to 37 competed for SJCC. The team ran well enough to qualify for the Northern California Community College Cross Country Finals. Several runners just missed qualifying for the State Meet. However, two of these runners were able to improve enough to reach the California State Community College Track Finals in the Spring of ’05.
We are now building the team for the 2005 Cross Country Season. We have three returning runners from last year’s team. They are Holly Johnson, Mandy Knudson, Kim T. Nguyen, and Mariana Sanchez. New runners are Veronica Alcantar and Monica Sandoval. It is our intention to continue to build and improve upon what we established last year. Our goal is to continually improve the Women’s Cross Country Program at SJCC. |
