10/2/23: The Kewpie Kooldown: Chile Pepper XC Festival

This weekend the Hickman cross country team traveled to Fayetteville, Arkansas for the Chile Pepper XC Festival, a yearly competition held at the University of Arkansas’ cross country course. This meet alongside last week’s Gans Creek Classic was absolutely massive with more than six and a half thousand runners across college, high school, and junior high school levels.

Hickman had great races across the board in the boy’s varsity, girl’s varsity, and the boy’s open race (Hickman’s boy’s JV ran in this race).

In the boy’s varsity race that included a total of 110 teams the Hickman boys placed 38th among those teams. Individually Hickman had three boys in the top 200 with Max Hogan, a junior placing 65th and running 16:21, Sean Keys, a senior who placed 138th and ran 16:52, and then junior Hank Cummings who finished in 196th and ran 17:09.

On the girls side, Hickman placing 59th out of 83 scored teams. They also had one girl in the top 200, Ellie Eastman, a junior who placed 199th and ran a time of 20:34.

For this whole competition this race much like it’s name was very hot and athletes from all of the races above or below had to run in less than ideal conditions and I applaud them for running so well considering those conditions, so without further a do let’s switch gears to the boy’s JV.

Like I said these races were very hot and for this particular one they had to change the race distance from 5k to 2 miles. Considering this and that there were so many people in this race it was very easy for people to get boxed in, or to get trapped. But, considering that Hickman still was able to place 26th out of 77 teams, and Hickman had two top 200 runners. Those were Collin Wise, sophomore, who placed 92nd, and ran 11:28, then there was freshman George Nichols, who placed 178th and ran 11:57.