Welcome to the 17th annual Gabriel Richard Cross Country Invitational!
We wish to thank all those who helped to make this year's Gabriel Richard Invitational a great success! We had over 1300 runners compete this year, 25% more than last year. The varisty races had 703 runners from 115 teams representing 63 schools making it one our most successful meets ever.
The weather was overcast. Early morning temperatures started in the mid 50s rising to the mid 60s in the afternoon for the small schools races. The course was soft and slow from the heavy rain that fell the previous day.
The surprise of the day had to be the performance of the Ann Arbor Greenhills women. Just a small D4 school with 6 runners, Greenhills stepped up and competed against the much larger D1 schools. They finished a very strong 6th overall losing only to powerhouses Pioneer, Saline, Livonia Stevenson, Livonia Churchill and Rockford (not their A team). Greenhills Jennifer Leichtman made her claim as this area's top runner by winning this race for the second straight year. Could a D4 State Championship be in the offing for Greenhills and Jennifer?
Map of the course. Click on the map for a larger image.
Pioneer women repeated as champions with 32 points and had 6 girls break 20 minutes. Churchill edged Stevenson for 3rd and Saline was a close 4th. Rockford did not run their A team and finished 5th.
Dexter men topped Chelsea to win the Division II men's race. Marian nosed out the Dexter women on a 6th place tiebreaker to win that race with Milan taking 3rd. Groves Rebecca Walter ran 18:57 and had the fastest time of the day even though there was no one remotely close to push her.
Napoleon won the Div. III men's race and Pittsford squeaked by Lutheran Westland 88-92 to win the women's race.
The race was held at the beautiful Hudson Mills Metropark. The park is located along the Huron River and features ample parking and easy access from US-23 and North Territorial. We arranged for free parking for all team buses this year.
Again this year we had three Race Divisions. The breakdown of Division race assignments was roughly as follows:
Division I
The complete varisty race results for all races are as follows: