Gabriel Dinnel, recently nicknamed "G-Man", entered the High School running scene with more credentials than any Panther in history. He started his freshman year strong, but an injury sent it spiraling downward. His age-group peers in the region are phenomenal; running against them, he has ran fast races, but was not known for winning the big races. In this big race, 206 runners, there were several accomplished runners. Today, rather than sitting right on their shoulder, G-Man ran to the mud pit in 5th place, pursuing them from a distance like an FBI agent. He took control the second half of the race, finishing with a smile on his face as he dominated the last 800 Meters. Gabriel not only knows how to run fast in the big races, but now he knows how to win!
a race that far!" Those were the words coming out of the mouth of Milan Shirakawa at the starting line of her first Cross Country race. Having run just the hurdles and the relays last year in track, she was not sure she could run a race of nearly 2 miles. But the coaching staff was quite confident that she would finish in at least the upper half as she did well in many workouts. Once the race got underway, the butterflies in her stomach must have turned to wings on her feet as she finished in 15th place out of 97 finishers (we are not sure if there were any non-finisher as maybe some got lost in the mud pit). Her time of 14 minutes and 14 seconds will be easy for her to remember when years down the road she talks about her very first XC race she ran in.