When St. Basil's girls cross country team stepped onto the starting line at its ACCA Championship, the squad was toeing the line together for the first time this fall.
"It started in September with illness and injury, just the goofiest things," said coach Greg Green. "In August we thought we could (win the 2A girls state championship), but by the end of September I was shaking my head. At the end of September we started all over again."
After failing to qualify for last fall's state championship, the St. Basil girls were determined to make it this year and make it big. But then the problems started.
"All of the top kids missed two to three weeks on flukes," Green said. "It just seemed like it kept snowballing."
But just in the nick of time things started to go St. Basil's way.
16. Kathleen Davies, Sr, 19:18 / 32. Christina Morelli, Sr, 19:48 / 34. Colleen Gilmore, So, 19:51 / 74. Rachel Morelli, Jr, 20:29 / 104. Liz Barrett, Fr, 20:55
"We lost a league meet at the beginning of October and then the next practice was the best we had. We started believing in ourselves," Green said.
After that practice things started to snowball again, but in a good way. St. Basil won the District 1 2A championship and on Saturday pulled off a huge comeback by capturing the 2A state championship. St. Basil scored 106 points to best runner-up Lancaster Mennonite's 139.
"Everything started to click," said senior co-captain Christina Morelli. "We just tried to keep our spirits up after so many things went wrong. We were serious when we needed to be, but also had fun."
Fellow co-captain Kathleen Davies, who led the team on Saturday and earned an individual medal, agreed that keeping things light-hearted was key.
"We would goof around during stretches," she said. "We just needed to do that. States had been on our minds since Aug. 5."
One thing the girls and the coach agreed on was that the Hershey Parkview course worked to their advantage. The team was running on pretty much no speed work, so the hilly 5K was well-suited for a team running off its base.
"This is a strength course and this whole team is strength runners," Davies said.
The team also got a confidence boost on Tuesday when Green had them run a 1,600 on the track followed by three minute pickups on the team's course loop. The pickups were the workout the squad had done back in October.
"They were 40 seconds faster," Green said. "I needed to show them they were in shape."