Three Bishop Noll cross country team runners advanced individually to regionals after placing in the IHSAA Highland Sectionals meet that took place Oct. 8 at Highland High School. 

Juniors Alessandra Lopez and Grace Buksa qualified on the girls team and freshman Saul Cordero 11 qualified for the boys team. 

Runners that advance to regionals can qualify as a team by placing top 5 out of 11 teams overall or by placing top 10 individually from non-qualifying teams. 

Second-year coach Colin Schreiber says the increase in effort and motivation by the runners has helped them have such a successful season.

“I’m extremely proud of them. The three of them have worked super hard at practice the entire season,” Schreiber says. “They really stepped it up as the season progressed.”

Schreiber believes the team’s success is due to the various changes made from last season to this season. 

“The biggest change from last season to this season is the amount of underclassmen and new runners that are on the team,” he says. “Six out of the 11 runners never ran cross country before, so it was a challenge trying to find workouts that they all could do. However, we were able to overcome that obstacle.”

Despite having mostly new runners on the team, the newcomers showed much promise throughout the entire season including freshmen Saul Cordero II and Alison Braviere. 

“I wasn’t expecting to have success with cross country since this is my first year but I have and it’s been super rewarding,” Cordero says. “My main reason for joining the team was to stay in shape for the other sports I’m involved in but I can now say that I genuinely enjoy running.”

Cordero started his season with a 5k time of 21:32 and ran a personal best of 20:11 at the IHSAA sectional meet. 

Braviere dropped an impressive 5 minutes off her time since the first meet in August. She’s projected to have even more success within the next three years of her high school career. 

Besides the newcomers being a key factor in the success of the cross country team, returning member Alessandra Lopez has been a valuable asset with her impressive times all season long.

“I think my increase of effort at practices and the coaching has helped me improve so much,” Lopez says. “I’m also playing soccer so that definitely has prepared me for meets and has kept me in shape.”

Lopez’s qualifying time for the IHSAA sectionals meet at Highland was 24:28. 

As the 2022-2023 ended with the regional meet on Saturday, Schrieber says he plans on promoting cross country more by trying to recruit students that are in off season and by promoting the team on the new Instagram page.

“We started a team instagram account in hopes to promote the cross country team,” he says. “I’m also contacting coaches of winter and spring sports to convince their players to join cross country. I want to expand the team as much as possible so that we can continue the program and qualify as a team.”