Above: Quinn Boardman (Desert Vista), Rylee Engelken (Perry), Nique Teixeira (Salpointe Catholic)
The Ever-Important 6th Runner
This past week we have already spotlighted the fastest returning 7th runners for boys and girls. Today we look at our fastest number six returning young women.
Some caveats on how we come up with these rankings; obviously, incoming freshmen can throw a wrench into these rankings, but we don't have high school times for these teens yet, so they are left out. Two, these rankings are based on these athletes' best cross country 5K times in 2019. We understand that different courses lend themselves to faster times than other courses, but this is just to give us a rough estimate of how the team's runners 1-7 rank against other teams' 1-7. The key here is we are talking about returning runners and not who was your 6th runner in 2019. After we account for seniors graduating, we are making an educated guess who will be your number 1-7 runners in 2020. So your number six runner in 2020 may have been your number 7, 8, or 9 runner in 2019, depending on how many athletes you graduated.
Today we are focusing on girl returning runners who are most likely to take their team's sixth slot. We had 132 teams who have at least 6 runners who were juniors or younger last year. Teams without at least 6 runners who were juniors or younger last year did not make this list.
We are going to focus on the returning sixth runners who ran a PR of sub-21 for their teams in 2019.
Other runners who broke 21-minute barrier and are looking to be their team's number 6 are Shelley Jarman (Highland - 20:53) and Isabel Schinella (Sunrise Mountain - 20:57).