On Saturday, November 5, the Cross Country team traveled to the Calaveras County Fairgrounds for the first round of playoffs. In a race versus every other Division 1 school in the section, the Royals needed to place high enough to qualify as an individual for the next round since our teams were still dealing with various injuries.

Lilian Luu was the standout performer of the day finishing in 10th place in the varsity girls race and easily qualifying for the next round after covering the 3-mile course in 19:29.

Unfortunately for our other runners, Saturday was a day of just missing the qualification spots. It began with Freshman Jessica Lundberg, who missed qualifying by 0.3 seconds. In the Sophomore Boys race, Favian Villa missed qualifying by two seconds, and in the Varsity Boys race, Marcus Cunanan missed his qualifying spot by only a few seconds as well. All three of them were the first individual runners to not move on.

There were plenty of other great races throughout the day for the Royal runners but those are the ones to highlight as they ran great races and the large sizes of the races just did not work out in our favor. Luu’s next race will be this Saturday, November 12, at Willow Hills Reservoir in Folsom where she looks to repeat her top 10 performance at the section Championships.