CHICO, CA -- The first rung of the championship season for Eastern Athletic League and Sacramento River League athletes was contested last Thursday at Hooker Oak Recreation Area of Bidwell Park. Coming into the meet, the Chico boys were tied with the Viking boys a top the league standings as both had won one of the two league center meets while coming in second in the other. Meanwhile the Chico girls were in a superior position having won both league center meets and could only lose a share of the league title if they placed two or more places behind the second place Vikings, an extremely unlikely scenario. Especially considering Pleasant Valley's top runner, and one of the section's best runners, Holly Alchin would be on the sidelines due to a painful thigh injury.

As it was the Chico girls dominated the varsity race as the Panthers claimed seven of the first nine places to win with 20 points to runner-up Pleasant Valley's 61 and third place Foothill's 63. Shasta's Elizabeth Merrill took the league individual title for the second year in the row using a strong second half of the race to pull from Chico's Ava Marie Csutoras to win with a time of 19:35. Csutoras finished a little over six second behind in 19:41. Four more Panthers crossed the line (Mira Sidhu - 20:04. Claire Edwards - 20:40, Reese Alvistur - 21.13, Sienna Jones - 21:19) before a runner from any other school managed to finish. Rounding out the EAL-SRL 1st team was Shasta's Dixie Lee who took seventh.

On paper Pleasant Valley should have had an easy time dispatching Chico for the league title if not for the health and fitness of their top two runners (Jackson Hein-ankle, Nolan McLoughlin-sick) being in doubt. However, a less than robust pace between Chico's top runner, Charlie Brennan and Hein, not only kept a lot of runners (mostly from Chico and PV) up front in the lead pack, but made Brennan vulnerable to Hein's lethal kick. Sure enough, the lead pack was whittled down to these two with under a half mile to go with only PV's Quentin Clarke able to stay reasonably close. Rounding the softball fields the final time, Hein surged pass Brennan and maintained a small gap all the way to the finish line to win with a time of 16:09. Brennan took second in 16:12.

Rounding out the top seven, for all-league honors, were Clarke (3rd - 16:24), Jackson's brother Austin (4th - 16:31), Chico's Matt Anderson (5th - 16:34), Chico's Larsen Cooper (6th - 17:00) and Chico's Carson Sasaki (7th - 17:02). Unfortunately for the Panthers four of the next five runners were Vikings and the one who wasn't was from Shasta. So the Vikings won the team title with 25 points to Chico's 33 while Foothill was a distant third with 96 points.

Chico cleaned up in the JV/Open divisional races sweeping the girls race with 15 points and winning the boys race with 20 points. Ally Sasaki, a Chico freshman, won her fifth race of the year in becoming the individual medalist in the girls JV race in a time only a few seconds off her course record. Meanwhile Nathan Gist, also a Panther freshman, took the individual title in the boys JV race in winning for the first time this year.