Dana Hills Captain's Log 

      Leaving his comfort zone, Shane moves out of the front pack to stick to the front runner from Central Union. Sometime during the race, Shane decides that simply simply drafting wasn’t enough, he wanted to lead. Side by side, the two runners were duking it out with each other, pushing each other to new limits. Finally, Shane breaks from him creating a gap to the finish. While the other runner picked him off at the very end, Shane still barrelled through the finish line at 16:41, the fourth fastest freshman time in school history leading the freshmen team to victory. After the race, all the other schools lowered their flags to half mast in honor of their team’s valiant, yet fruitless attempt to strip Brea’s sovereignty and dominance. Because of Shane’s persistence throughout summer and school, even getting in ten mile runs on his own when he couldn't make it to practice. Clearly the successor for the next four years has just been chosen, and the crown has been passed down to Shane.

      Brea’s juniors and seniors had a great opportunity to run some PR’s on the lightening fast course at Dana Hills Invitational. In the juniors race, Chris Thornburgh ran an impressive time of 17:37 while placing 25th overall. He ran over 30 seconds faster than he did at the Woodbridge Invitational a week ago. Jacob Edberg had reason to boast after also running about 30 seconds faster than his previous race. Most impressive was Bryan Scanlan, running almost a minute faster than at Woodbrige. These guys have put in a ton of work over the summer and the times are starting to reflect their dedication to the sport. It is still early in the season and more great times are bound to come.

      Big and mighty Dana Hills is not as tough as we thought. At the Dana Hills Invite on Saturday, our varsity boys proved that they could hang with the big dogs. Gio Orellana paced behind the number one runner of Dana for the entirety of the race in route to a 14 47 finish. Caleb Myers raced big with a time of 15 11 and finished as our second scorer. Daniel Perez, even though having somewhat of an off day compared to his last races, took the lead during parts of the race and finished with a time of 15 16. Back into his racing shape, Kevin Mcnulty had a big race with a time of 15 19 and was our 4th scorer. Rounding out the top 5 was John Dempsey, who after having two not-so-great races, overcame some adversity in route a a major pr of 15 19. Jon Tobin and Tyler Spicer packed up with Dempsey and Mcnulty for the majority of the race and both ran fast times of 15 21 and 15 25 respectively. Drew Apahidean ran a pr of 15 44 as well as Tommy Valenti with a time of 16 03. Nolan Orozco and Dylan Perlson both also ran in the varsity race and had solid times of 16 31 and 16 32. The team lost to one of the top teams in California and the nation by a score of 66-84 on Dana Hills home course which is an accomplishment in itself. The varsity squad looks to continue its run of good performances this week at League Preview and Brea Invite.

Brought to you by the hard working and dedicated 2016/2017 Brea XC Captains