ALBANY — The Comets had arguably their best boys cross country season in several years in 2021, according to coach Tony Brewer. 

“We thought we had a legit shot to finish in the top two at the sectional meet and qualify for state, but an injury to Ethan Koss the week before sectionals cost us around 30 points, so we ended up finishing fifth instead of probably ended up third,” he said.

The team graduated all-conference runner and captain Jesse Schwartz, but returns Koss, Gage Roth, Brian Cid, Brayden Bakken and Drew Sertle. Newcomers Sean Morales and Kaleb Broughton will add some depth to the lineup as well.

“Five of our top six back and others who hope to figure into our varsity, we expect to be better this season and hopefully that will result in a berth to the state meet.  That being said, the goal for this year is go into the Conference and Sectional meet healthy and ready to go, so we are able to challenge the other top teams such as Darlington, Boscobel, and Belleville,” Brewer said. “We definitely have an experienced team coming back, which I think will definitely be a positive.   I believe this group will be motivated to improve on the success they had last season, which will result in great efforts at practice and meet preparation.  They are also a pretty close team, so I believe team chemistry will be very good, which will help lead to success. We did lack mental toughness at times last season, and if we want to achieve our goals this year that will have to improve.”

On the girls side, three long-time, accomplished 4-year varsity runners graduated (Emileigh Dallman, Payton Wachholz and Kaiya Zurfluh). But the Comets bring back a slew of accomplished runners again this year. McKenna Broughton is a state qualifier, and Ava Ahnen, Linsey Mueller and Abby Hollis are all strong runners. Newcomers Emerson Briggs and Amy Schwartz will add even more depth.

“We lost three seniors that were in our top five, so we will see if can come close to the success that we had last season. The goal is to keep everyone healthy and running their best in October and hopefully we can be in the mix with the top teams in our conference and sectional,” Brewer said. 

Brewer said Broughton and Ahnen will give the squad “a very good 1-2 punch up front.”

“I believe we have girls that know what it takes to be successful, so they will continue to do the things it takes for our team to be as good as it can be,” Brewer said. Numbers will be a big challenge this year as I am not sure we will have seven runners. We know what we got with our top two runners, but the question will be how big is our gap to our number three runner, which could be Linsey who had a very good track season last year, or freshman Emerson Briggs who is a competitive athlete, so once she gets confidence she will keep getting better. Then we have to work on gaps closing through our fifth runner, which could be returner Abby Hollis or newcomer Amy Schwartz.”