Laramie's Ready For State Cross Country Meet

The Class 4A State Cross Country Championships will be on Friday in chilly conditions at the Paradise Valley Country Club in Casper.

Laramie will compete with the rest of the classification. The girls’ race begins at 1 p.m. followed by the boys at 1:40 p.m.

LHS didn’t have the strongest showing at the conference meet on their home course last week. The girls finished in third place, while the boys were sixth out of six teams.

Laramie coach Greg Schabron said getting that type of race out of the way is what they’re hoping happened.

“Talk about kind of falling flat, and when the entire team falls flat, you take a hard look at what’s going on? I think we’ve got those things squared away, and the focus is on the race ahead and not the one behind us.”

Schabron knows the prospects at the state meet. He feels Sheridan is a heavy favorite on the boys’ side, with Cheyenne Central up there. In the girls’ division, Jackson, Natrona County, and Central look to be tough teams.

“One thing that might be nice for both our boys and girls teams coming in off such a flat conference race is we’re hoping people aren’t looking for Laramie. Sometimes those bigger races, we can kind of sneak kids in-between other teams, and we haven’t run a meet this big this year, so splitting scores is going to make a big difference.”

He said that a lot of the team has seen this course before, as it hosted the conference meet last year.

Of course, the state meet was moved up one day due to a bigger winter storm approaching Wyoming on Saturday. Schabron felt that wasn’t a big issue and didn’t impact their training or schedule this week.

“I think the most challenging thing to work on this week, and we’re going to try to do on Friday is they know the importance of the meet, they always have, is to keep them calm and make sure they remain confident. It’s going to come down to how much pressure they put on themselves and how they handle that.”

He wants to make sure his team is ready and knows the course, which Schabron said will weave back-and-forth a bit.

Both teams finished fifth in 2019.