JH & HS Cross Country Teams excelling in 2009

A note from Coach Eric Hodge:


This season has been a pretty good one for our cross country program, we have had 5 to 6 boys all year (which is up from 1-2 last year) and 1 girl competing individually. Since the beginning of the season I have seen a lot of progress from all of my runners. 

Our team leader is Mike Burgette who just recently ran his best time of the season at 18:58, so he is peaking at the right time of the year. I look for him to be 1st or 2nd team all league in our half of the SWBL. Also doing well for the boys team are Sophomore John Pope who is our #2 runner and Freshman Josh Young who is our #3 is coming off of an injury and should be back at full strength for the district meet on Oct. 24th. Clint Kohl has been a solid contributor for us and freshman Blake Butler has been improving at every meet. 

Our lone female runner Ashley Gierzak has done a great job this season and has other coaches from around the league talking about her improvements, she has dropped her personal best time nearly two minutes and should be a 1st or 2nd team all league runner. 

For the junior high team I have 4 girl runners; Shelbie Elliott, Elizabeth Alcorn, Kariss Alcorn, and Rachel Anderson. Kariss and Elizabeth should both be top 10 runners in the league and have a bright future in cross country ahead of them. 

I am very proud of these kids and how hard they have worked for me, I'm trying to build a program at Carlisle and with the help of these kids I can see that we will have a solid team in a short period of time.