GC INVITATIONAL
Lakeside and Lake Hamilton split inaugural junior high meet
Lakeside and Lake Hamilton split the inaugural junior high Garland Country Invitational titles Saturday with Lakeside winning the girls title and Lake Hamilton taking the boys.
Created as a chance to give area junior high cross country runners a meet at the end of the season, three schools participated with Barton Junior High in El Dorado joining Lakeside and Lake Hamilton.
“We used to go to Cabot,” said Lake Hamilton head coach Brandon Smith. “Cabot, they have a junior high meet the same day, so they had theirs today, kind of a finale meet. It kind of got to the point where they had grown so big that they had to change locations, and then it got to the point where they had to start limiting the number of kids you can enter. We didn’t want to get in a situation where we can only let like 10 kids run when we had 40 kids on one of those teams.
“So, you know, that’s where we get the idea, ‘Let’s kind of have our own little junior high finale,’ and kind of build it up a little bit. If we have a small group, that’s fine. It gives all the kids an opportunity, and then the thing I really liked about today is we gave out 20 medals to the top 20 finishers in both races and some of those kids that finished from spots 10 to 20 in both races, they hadn’t gotten a medal all year. And so that was a good way to kind of let them finish up the year and get kind of a reward that they’ve worked hard for.”
While Lake Hamilton won the boys title, the junior Wolves were unable to take first place overall. Lakeside
eighth-grader Joseph Bariola won the boys division of the meet in 11:33, 47 seconds ahead of second-place finisher Miguel Salazar of Lake Hamilton.
“I haven’t looked this week, but last week I think he was fourth or fifth in the nation as an eighth grader in the two mile cross country,” said Lakeside head coach Jeff Haynes. “So he’s doing extremely well.”
Bariola’s father, Brian, was a two-time state cross country champion at Bryant.
“[His] dad ran a 4:18 mile in high school,” Haynes noted. “I think Joseph will be high 4:40s this year as an eighth grader. And the thing is I have to remind myself at practice that he’s only 14 years old because he’s up there with [junior Caleb] Wrublesky and [sophomore Hunter] Dorathy and [senior William] Mims. He’s up there grinding with them every day. He starts falling off, you know, and I start getting on him, and then I have to just remind myself, ‘Hey, this kid’s only an eighth grader.’”
The junior Wolves ended up taking the next 13 spots in the boys race, earning the best team score available without having the overall winner (20). Lakeside had 55, Barton 63.
Inversely, Lake Hamilton’s top two female runners of the day — Adrina Rodriguez (13:42) and Lani Inman (14:04) — took the top spots in the girls race while Lakeside swept nine of the next 12 places for a win with 26 points. Lake Hamilton finished second with 35, and Barton had 77.
“Going into that race, I kind of expected that it would be a little bit of a push for us to be able to win that one,” Smith said. “We’d moved five freshmen up at Lake Hamilton last week, and then actually coach Hunt’s daughter, who normally runs right up there with Adrina, she wasn’t able to able to run today due to sickness and so that kind of hurts there.”
Haynes was pleased with the way his team ran Saturday, noting that six of his top seven finishers are in the seventh grade.
“The future is going to be bright, bright, bright,” he said. “I think that group right there could possibly rewrite cross country history in the state of Arkansas. Because when you’ve got seventh graders running 22 minute 5Ks, yeah, that’s gonna be good stuff and a bunch of them. It’s not like on my boys side, I’ve got Bariola. He’s just a phenomenal runner, but I got one Bariola. I’ve got seven or eight of those seventh grade girls that can step up and do the job.”