Pirates Host Season’s First Cross Country Meet

The Progress

The Moapa Valley High School Cross Country team hosted its first and only home meet of the season on Saturday, Mar. 6. Ironically, it came exactly one year after the MVHS Track and Field teach had its one and only meet last year before the season was shut down by the pandemic.

MVHS Girls coach Heather Humes said it was exciting to see the local kids competing again.
“It was an incredible experience as a coach to watch our kids toe the line again and have the opportunity to compete as Pirates,” Humes said.

The meet went well, even with a multitude of health guidelines and adjustments that were required. Moapa ran against Bishop Gorman and Faith Lutheran in the meet.

In a break from traditional cross country races, the top 7 runners from each boys and girls teams were in the first race together.

Pirate senior Preston Humes took the lead from the start of the race and lead the entire 3.1 miles. Andrew Specht (sophomore from Bishop Gorman) tucked in behind Humes and ran most of the race on his heels until the last half mile when Preston pulled away from him to win the race with a time of 16:47, 13 seconds ahead of Specht.

The other Varsity finishers were Marcus Shambaugh who took 4th, Cyrus Katich in 6th, Ethan Witter in 7th, and Maximus Shambaugh in 8th to round out the top 5 scorers for the Pirates. This performance gave them the team win with 23 points over Bishop Gorman who had 34 points.

The girls’ competition going simultaneously with the boys’ race was a new experience for the Lady Pirate runners. Emma Humes took an early lead. She was in the lead off the very first turn ahead of freshman Sophia Kellogg from Bishop Gorman.

The girls ran the majority of the race with Humes in front and Kellogg a single step behind. With about 400 meters left, Kellogg took the lead and won the race in a time of 19:57. Humes was close behind in second place at 20:06.

The Pirates only had 3 other female runners this week, and they all performed well. McKinley Bledsoe was 9th, Freshman Beverly Potts had a great performance to finish 12th, and Haley Bush finished 16th.
Coach Humes said that it was a great first outing for the Pirate teams.

“Our home course is one of the harder courses we will run on in Southern Nevada,” Humes said. “So to see it in our first meet, as kids are still getting in running shape, was an interesting experience.”

Humes said that most of the returning runners performd at a high level and surpassed their previous personal records for this course by 30 seconds to a full minute.

“That is an incredible indication of how strong and ready these athletes are to compete again,” she said. “We also have a few new runners and all of them were able to do really well and run strong races.”