Punahou Cross-Country Invitational

Saturday's weather was brutal. High humidity, hot, and heavy vog. There also was a flood warning in effect for a little later in the evening. The kids also had to face the "dreaded hill", 2 times for the intermediates and girls open, 3 times for the JV boys and varsity races.

In the girls intermediate, Kimberly Pugliese took the early lead and seemed to be in control, but somewhere in the latter half of the race, both Maryknoll runners passed her and took first and second. Kimberly was running against 2 large obstacles. The Mililani bus was late so she had little or no time to warm up. She also won the King Intermediate the day before so it wasn't that surprising that she had some difficulties at the end of the race.

The winner was Brie Adams with a time of 14:07. Second place went to Allison Calabrese who had a time 14:12. Kimberly was at 14:17.

Mililani won the team competition with a score of 46 points. Punahou was close behind at 56 points.

The boys intermediate race was won by Borys Pleskacz of Iolani in a time of 11:52. I believe this was a meet record. Borys has been running well all season but has really come on strong in recent weeks.

Iolani took the team competition with a terrific score of 26 points. Iolani had 4 boys in the top 10, and 7 in the top 20.

Brooke Laporte finished the 2 mile course in a time of 13:49 to win the Girls Open division and lead Punahou to a dominating victory. Punahou had 7 girls in the top 11 totalling an almost perfect 17 points and, once again, showing the tremendous depth of the Punahou girls team this year.

The boys JV division saw the first OIA individual winner when Tomoyuki Miura of Roosevelt won with a time of 18:15. Radford took the team title with Kamehameha, Punahou, and Iolani close behind.

Haley Abing made a successful return from injury with a dominating 19:51 over the 3 mile course. I think I heard that was a meet record. Pretty impressive when you realize she's been out for the past few weeks with a back injury. In the team competition it was Punahou continuing their overwhelming strength with a score of 36 points. Kamehameha, Iolani and Mililani were quite a bit behind. Punahou had their 5 scorers finish no lower than 11th.

The boys varsity was also won by an OIA runner, Bryce Jenkins from Leilehua. Bryce had a time of 16:42 and put in a strong bid for the state championship. Kon Weber (Iolani) will have something to say about that but on this day it was Bryce by 21 seconds.

Bryce's time was 3 seconds behind Jeremy Kamakaala's time in last year's Punahou Invitational. Both ran with large leads so it's hard to tell how they could have done in a closer race. (thanks to Len Tsuhako for that heads up!)

Kamehameha won the team title with a score of 56 points. Punahou and Iolani both had 93 points, with Punahou taking 2nd due to the tiebreaker system.

Next meet will be the Iolani Intermediate Invitational, the "unofficial" Intermediate State Championship. There will be no ILH JV or Varsity meet this week.

To visit the cross-country photo galleries, please click here.