Princeton Girls Cap Incredible Season by Taking 4th at NXR
The Princeton girls team poses with their well-deserved 4th place trophy. | Photo from RunnerSpace
Having already established themselves as one of the best teams in New Jersey, the Princeton girls went to Nike Cross Regionals and proved that they’re one of the best teams in the whole Northeast, taking 4th in the Northeast Championship!
Princeton finished with 191 points, only behind Union Catholic NJ (69 points), Champlain Valley VT (166), and Cumberland RI (176). Princeton once again beat every other NJ school besides nationally ranked Union Catholic, which included topping Ridgewood by 9 points. To beat a team like Ridgewood for the third straight weekend takes impressive ability and consistency! Their unparalleled depth definitely helped with that.
Princeton ran a smart race, going out conservatively and then moving up well over the second half of the very difficult Bowdoin Park course. Bowdoin Park is actually considered by many people to be roughly 20 seconds slower than Holmdel Park, due to its long, tall climb over the first 1.5 miles. For reference, here is the Bowdoin’s elevation profile:
Compare that to Holmdel’s elevation profile, scaled the same:
Even having to run up and down that mountain, the Princeton girls averaged 19:56! That’s comparatively even faster than the 19:43 they averaged at the Meet of Champions. And it’s certainly much faster than the 20:21 that they averaged on this course in September when they ran the Bowdoin XC Classic.
Kajol Karra made the All-Region team by finishing 19th in 19:19, one of the five fastest times ever by a Mercer County girl at Bowdoin. Grace Hegedus finished 30th in 19:37, a new Bowdoin Park PR for her. Eowyn Deess had an incredible race, moving up sixteen places over the last half of the race to finish 34th in 19:42 – that’s seven seconds faster than her Holmdel PR from last week! Rosemary Warren (87th in 20:28) and Phoenix Roth (94th in 20:36) had great races to round out the scoring. Roth, like Deess, passed sixteen girls over the final 1.5 miles to help secure 4th place for the team.
Princeton was just 25 points away from qualifying for NXN, which is amazing. Last season, they weren’t even top 10 in New Jersey; this season, they’re Top 4 in the Northeast and they’re being talked about on national websites. That’s incredible progress in just one year! It will be exciting to see them continue to rise over the next year. They’re returning six of their top seven runners, and they’ll have their sights set on NXN 2025.