“The boys arrived ready to race their hearts out—and they delivered,” said Coach Kate Guthrie, after the Northern California CIF North Coast Section Championships in Hayward.
The team has been increasingly competitive as the three-month long cross country season progressed, and now find themselves boarding the bus for Fresno and for the CIF State Cross Country Championships, to be held Saturday, Nov. 29.
This marks the first time in collective memory the Healdsburg team has been invited to the state championship, though individual runners have qualified in the past.
Their invitation hinged on being one of the top three Division 5 teams at the North Coast meet last weekend, Nov. 22, and the team pulled it off – finishing in third place behind the expected winner San Francisco University and Convent & Stuart Hall, also of San Francisco.
“Lucas Welty set the tone with a powerful, wire-to-wire performance, charging to a 4th-place finish and breaking up an exceptionally strong pack from San Francisco University High School,” said Guthrie. The first-place team had all five scoring runners in the top 10, giving them an impressive 19 points overall. (Points are scored by placement – so the first-place finisher gets 1 point, second 2, etc. Lowest team scores win; a 15-point score would be a sweep of the top five positions.)
“Thanks to this collective effort and undeniable toughness, the team secured 3rd place overall and punched its ticket to the state meet next Saturday,” said Guthrie.
Healdsburg’s third place in the race (125 points) was assured by the competent running of the rest of the team. Welty’s time of 15.59.40 was just a half-breath under the 16-minute mark over the three-mile course. Winning time was 15:32.79, from junior Ben Friedland of SFU. Welty was the highest-finishing sophomore in the race.
Not far behind Welty was senior Jake McWilliams, “maneuvering the course with experience” as the coach said. He ultimately placed 13th, with Domenico Cornilsen close behind in 18th, giving the team an impressive three runners in the top 20.
Freshman Phoenix De Maria Nall continued to shine, finishing 29th and earning recognition as the third-fastest freshman in the race. Jack Beckman kept the momentum going, refusing to let up as he powered through the course to take 65th and round out the scoring five, bringing 125 points to the team – ahead of College Prep’s 172.
Guthrie rounded up her report: “Freshman Liam McKenzie, the team’s sixth runner, showed tremendous grit by finishing the race despite hearing a ‘pop’ in his hip flexor on the final downhill—an injury that will unfortunately sideline him for the rest of the season. Lukas Brennan closed out the lineup as the seventh runner, holding steady all the way to the line.”
Next stop for the 2025 Healdsburg cross country team is the last – the state CIF Championships at Woodward Park in Fresno, on Saturday, Nov. 29. The meet starts at 8:30am; the Division 5 boys race is at 12:30pm.Day-of-the-race results can be found online at https://www.rtspt.com/events/cif/xc2025/.
