Summit Cross Country Ranked No. 7

National poll has Summit's girls cross country team No. 7 in team rankings

By Beau Eastes / The Bulletin

Winners of the past three Class 5A state girls cross-country championships, the Storm have taken their program to another level this season. Heavy favorites to claim a fourth consecutive state title, the Summit girls were ranked No. 7 in the country last week in the Powerade Fab 50 ESPNHS team rankings.

“The girls, based on their times, are running faster than any team I've ever seen,” Storm coach Dave Clark says. “They just keep getting better, this group (of seniors) I've had. They keep improving every year.”

Two-time defending state champion Megan Fristoe, a senior, leads Summit's varsity seven. Fristoe, the first high school female runner in the state to have broken 18 minutes on a 5,000-meter course this year, has been a force at the state meet since her freshman season when she placed fourth. Since then she has posted 10 career cross-country wins, including two state titles.

Fristoe's biggest challenger for a third straight championship might come from her own team. Fellow senior Ashley Maton has the fifth-fastest 5K time in the state this year — the second-best in 5A behind only Fristoe. Arguably the best sprinter on the team, Maton won the 5A girls 1,500 at the state track meet last spring and placed second in the 800.

Freshman Piper McDonald, junior Tess Nelson and seniors Sara Fristoe, Kira Kelly and Keelin Moehl — all elite runners in their own right — make up the rest of the Storm's varsity squad. McDonald has the makings of a future state champion, while Sara Fristoe and Kelly both have finished in the top 15 at state the past two years.

“Every year we seem to reload,” Clark says. “But this year's reload is special.”

Summit's foray into the national rankings is impressive, but it is not unprecedented in Central Oregon. In the early 1990s, Bend High's girls team made annual appearances in The Harrier magazine's national rankings, ending the 1992 season No. 1 in the country after winning the large-school state championship with 20 points. The Lava Bears' boys team also won state that season and finished No. 15 in The Harrier rankings, leading the magazine to rank Bend's boys and girls combined cross-country program as No. 1 in the nation.

“We (the girls team) scored 18 points at the Stanford Invitational midseason that year,” recalls former Lava Bear cross-country coach Bob Latham, who still lives in Bend. “Bob Womack, who used to announce the NCAA national championship meet, said that was the finest high school cross-country team he'd ever seen in his life.”

Latham claimed 14 state cross-country titles while at Bend High; his girls program won six consecutive state championships between 1990 and 1995. His 1992 team, however, set the bar for dominance. Bend's five scoring runners finished second, third, fifth, sixth and eighth at the state meet. The Lava Bears' No. 6 and No. 7 runners placed ninth and 11th, respectively. Maybe most impressive was that all seven runners finished within 16 seconds of one another.

“Nobody in the country could ever beat a team like that,” Latham says. “Ever.”

While comparisons between today's Summit team and Bend's program in 1992 are inevitable, the two competed in extremely different eras. Today, girls cross-country teams run 5,000 meters, just like their male counterparts. In 1992, girls still ran on a 3,000-meter course. (The 1993 season was the first time boys and girls ran 5,000 meters at the state meet.) Also, Bend High won its championships in the old Class 4A, which at the time was made up of the 73 largest schools in the state. Summit's run of titles has been in Class 5A, the second-largest classification based on enrollment since the Oregon School Activities Association added two levels of competition after the 2005-06 school year.

Regardless of the differences in the time periods in which they won, both the Summit and Bend girls dynasties share the same mindset it takes to pull off multiple state championships.

“Once at state (Lava Bear runner) Brynn Abby was asked by a reporter after we ripped everyone if it was the altitude in Central Oregon,” Latham says. “She didn't back down and told him, ‘It's not the altitude, it's the attitude.' ”

Nineteen years later, that winning attitude is still going strong in Central Oregon.

— Reporter: 541-383-0305; beastes@bendbulletin.com.