CdM, Sage girls ready to go

For the first meet this season, the Corona del Mar High and Sage Hill School girls’ cross country teams expect to run in cold weather on Saturday.

The first cold-weather meet of the season is also the last one. The Sea Kings and Lightning will be running at the CIF State Cross Country Championships, at Woodward Park in Fresno.

CdM’s girls, who finished fifth in CIF Southern Section Division 3 last Saturday at Mt. San Antonio College, also will be running in the first race of the morning for the second straight meet. The Division 3 girls race at the state championships starts at 8:30 a.m.

“We’re going to go after it the best we can,” CdM Coach Bill Sumner said. “The weather’s going to be cold, and our girls like that. We haven’t had it cold all year, and it’s going to be 45 degrees when we run. They put the gloves on and go.”

The Sea Kings are back in the state championships for the second straight year after missing it in 2012 and 2013 for the first time in program history. They would like to improve on their ninth-place finish from a year ago.

Junior Raquel Powers, who finished 12th individually in CIF Southern Section Division 3, leads CdM. Senior co-captains Lilly Schmidt, Jacqueline Choe and Hannah Crane also have been running well for the Sea Kings, while senior Katie Correnty was the fifth-place scorer last weekend.

Freshman Gigi Lee and junior Bella Gerken also contribute for CdM. Sumner said he would like to see a good race from Gerken, who is in her first year running after previously playing tennis. She placed third on CdM’s team at the Division 3 preliminaries.

“I’m hoping we get another big day from Bella,” Sumner said. “We get another day like that, we move right up the ladder.”

He added that he also believes Schmidt and Choe have room for improvement, which also could help the Sea Kings’ cause.

“Those three still have more,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

Not many of the Sage Hill girls, meanwhile, have seen the state meet course at Woodward Park. Last year, then-sophomore Julia Lowe was the Lightning’s only athlete to advance to state.

This year, the Lightning are there as a team for the first time since 2008, after finishing third in CIF Southern Section Division 5 at Mt. SAC. Freshman Emma Dickerson led the way with a seventh-place individual finish, while Lowe placed 16th.

Freshman Maya Jaffe, sophomore Ashton Carroll and freshman Olivia Lowe were the other scorers for Sage Hill, which has no seniors among its top seven runners.

Coach Nate Miller said he believes the Lightning could better the previous best program finish at state, a seventh-place showing in Division 5 in 2006. They will run Saturday at 10:40 a.m.

“We talked a little bit about our 2006 team this week, and how they finished seventh,” Miller said. “We’ve been tracking pretty well against them historically. We’re pretty confident that we can better that finish and be in the top five on Saturday. The girls are excited about that.”

Miller said that Julia Lowe has talked with the team this week about her experience last year on the state meet course. The other person with state meet experience is Sage assistant coach Jenna (Ridgway) Corliss, who ran for Santa Barbara San Marcos in high school.

“My hope is that we’ll be a little bit less nervous this week than we were last week,” Miller said. “I think last week, nerves got to them a little bit. I want them to be loose and not super-nervous about performing at a high level ... We even had a couple of kids who got sick to their stomach. We want to try to ease the pressure this week.”