By Mark SHELTON

In yet another strong showing of the CVHS girls varsity cross country team, the second meet of the Pacific League high schools was held at Crescenta Valley Park on Thursday, Oct. 15. Coming off of better then expected performances at the Staub/Barnes and Clovis invitational meets during the last two weeks, Crescenta Valley High School hosted Arcadia, Burroughs (Burbank), Burbank, Glendale, Hoover, Muir, and Pasadena high schools.

The CV boys varsity beat Glendale, Hoover, and Burbank while losing to Arcadia and Burroughs. Mike Duncan led the Falcons, coming in seventh overall and closely followed by Josh Carlos in eighth. Cory Williams, Bob Anderson and freshman Aaron Esparza filled out the remainder of CV’s top five finishers while Jordan Miller and Dylan Devens ran sixth and seventh for the Falcons. The overall winner of the race was Ammar Mousa from Arcadia with a time of 15:41.

The girls varsity team took control early on claiming second, third, fourth, eighth and tenth places to convincingly win the race over all the other teams. While the race was won by Catrina McAlister from Arcadia, sophomore Brooke Moultrie beat the usual number one Falcon finisher, junior Claudia Pham, by two-thirds of a second to place second and third, respectively, closely followed by junior Anneke Kakebeen in fourth place. Sophomore Ali Johnson and freshman Cali King rounded out the top five finishes for CV with Eliza Collison and Carli Opland handling sixth and seventh finishes for the team.

“We came off the invitationals with good performances against old rival Arcadia and Burbank but we really wanted to take them in a league race,” said head CC coach Mark Evans. “It was a very good day for our varsity.”

Runners from Glendale, Hoover and Burroughs (Burbank) had great views of the back of CV’s jerseys as they finished well behind the determined Falcons.

In the junior varsity boys race Arcadia, Burroughs and Glendale fought it out for the top three spots, all of them besting the hard running Falcons which were represented by Kamen Hristov, David Owens, James Ossiff, Simon Karlsson, Ben Warner and Derek Sobol.

The girls JV team whooped Burroughs but lost to Arcadia in their point spreads while Glendale, Hoover and Burbank did not have enough runners to field a complete team.

The JV team consisted of (in their CV finishing order) Diane Lombardi, Stacy Carlos, Kaitlan Reininger, Joyce Lee, Christina Galvin, Eileen Martin, Vanessa Fonseca and Laura Widholm.

The boys soph/frosh team finished in a disappointing fourth place overall behind Arcadia, Burbank and Burroughs on the day.  Sophomores Tyler Bradshaw, Thomes Gustovich and Jacob Smith took 14th, 18th and 19th overall places respectively and were followed by a body of 13 other CV runners.

The girls soph/frosh team beat rivals Arcadia and Burroughs but lost to Burbank. CV’s Katie Callister took third overall while Maddy Gabor took fifth, Amber Zadravecz 11th, Hannah Benson13th  and Monica Lyons 15th for the top five finishes on the Falcon squad. Thirteen other runners represented CV and showed solid promise for the young and building team.