Aidan Sarazen Staff Writer In recent years, the Latin Romans have had a solid cross country team, achieving great feats for a small private school. In the past three years, the Romans had enormous successes as the boy’s team qualified all three years for the state meet in Peoria, and even won the sectional meet for the first time in the school’s history. These three successful years of cross country, however, were led by Tom Cox, Britt Henderson, and Ethan Lee, who are now all away at college. Although these talented runners have graduated from Latin, the team still has a lot of flair. The 2012 Latin cross country team, led by coach Dan Daly, has already started off the year strong; both the boy’s and girl’s teams placed third in the first two meets. Sophomore Jacob Silverman and junior Victoria Bianco placed first as an individual relay team in the second meet. For the third race of the season the team gathered outside of Latin at four o’clock in the morning to drive three hours down to Peoria. The dedication to the team was clear, when every member of the team—including two girls who had to take the ACT but were there in spirit—showed up ready to run before the crack of dawn. The competition of the races was fierce, but both the Roman girls and boys placed higher than the state qualifying Latin team did last year, demonstrating the team’s potential. The boy’s team captain, Brian Dhingra, believes that this year’s team will be successful due to “a lot of energetic young guys that are all competitive and willing to push each other”. These ‘young guys’ that Dhingra is talking about are the ten sophomores. Without top runner Andrew Nadler, who is out with a leg injury, six of the seven boys varsity runners are sophomores, and the top four runners on the team are all sophomores. Coach Daly, who started as a volunteer coach for the Latin cross country team in 1990 and has seen over 20 years of Latin cross country, thinks the sophomores have a chance to break Latin records. He sees “no ceiling on the success of the sophomores, so long as they keep pushing each other and having fun”. The girl’s team also has potential to be successful. Senior captains Reba Orloff and Kristina Mensik lead the team of great runners including junior Victoria Bianco, and sophomore Abigail Nadler. Victoria thinks the girl’s team “looks really good this year”, and is excited for the upcoming meets. She wants to qualify individually for state again this year, and there is hope that the rest of the girl’s team can qualify with her. The Romans cross country team this year has big shoes to fill, but the early successes of this season, positive attitude of the runners, and sheer speed of the Latin athletes make that a realistic possibility.]]>
