9/1/25 Nerdsletter

jayslagle
Sep 1
11 min read

Updated: Sep 2

Contributor: The Nerd

This is our first mostly-weekly Nerdsletter of the XC season where we share information and ask Nebraskans for help in covering this great sport. If you like what you see in the Nerdsletter, on our web page and on social media, please share it with your friends and family. We'll cover some housekeeping issues this week, so apologies in advance if you already know this.

If you're new to the Nerds, we represent approximately 40 volunteer Nerds across Nebraska who will take and share pictures from over 100 meets this fall, issue weekly individual rankings for all four Classes, compile and share meet results, and generally serve as an information hub for high school, collegiate and junior high cross country. We're not here to make money; we don't take sponsorships and we lose a surprising amount of money selling Nerd t-shirts. We're simply here to share our love of the sport.

Stress relief and big goals

As our Nerd team has grown, Class A meets in Omaha and Lincoln are usually covered by Nerds who have children competing. That has allowed me to venture outside of Omaha for smaller meets, which is why I shot the Weeping Water and East Butler meets last Thursday.

One of the neat things about Class C and D meets is that they often include junior high races. After Corbett Lanum of Brownell Talbot and Zoey Smith of Ashland-Greenwood took the top two spots of the high school girls race at Weeping Water, they returned to the start line to give advice to their junior high teammates. At the East Butler meet, I saw dozens of high school runners lining the trail to give encouragement. In particular, two Wisner-Pilger girls were channeling Steve Magness and telling kids from multiple teams "you can do hard things,' a good message given the difficulty of the East Butler course. One of the reasons I love cross country is that spectators often cheer for athletes regardless of their team affiliation.

A Wall Street Journal article this morning referenced a research study published in 2024 in the Industrial Relations Journal. "Of the 90 different stress-reduction strategies tested in corporate settings, which included meditation, massage and breathing exercises, only one consistently mitigated the negative effects of stress: serving others." The mentoring of and cheering for junior high teammates immediately came to mind.

On Thursday I talked to a coach as we walked back to the starting line. I mentioned that I had spent a few minutes around a few of her 7th-graders while I was taking pictures. In the course of our conversation, she dropped a pearl I've never heard: "They need cross country more than cross country needs them." Her point was simple. While it was unclear whether any of those kids would excel in high school cross country, her goal was to give them something even better: the self-discipline, fortitude, positive role models, anti-depressive effects and the myriad other benefits that can be a byproduct of distance running.

Odds and ends

Here are a few things that caught our eye over the past week:

Martin Aringu, Omaha Central (#263, shot by Royal Nerd)

Our first big surprise of the season came from Martin Aringu. Among the four races-by-grade at Class of Metro, the Omaha Central junior clocked the fastest time of 16:45 in his first-ever cross country race. A fairly recent immigrant from Uganda, he had never run a race in his life before he ran a 2:35 800 earlier this year during an offseason indoor meet. Nerd Junior had been tipped off about Martin's potential but he didn't pass that along to Nerd Senior, which is why Martin was omitted from the preseason watch list.
Tatum Nielson of Bellevue won the Class of Metro meet on Saturday in 18:38. According to Papio South Coach Haselhorst, that time ranks as 5th-fastest all-time for girls at the Walnut Creek course.

Cece Kramper, Omaha Duchesne
We wrote in our Class B girls preview that Cece Kramper of Omaha Duchesne, ranked #1, probably had a sub-18:00 result coming early in the season. We expected it to happen at the Augustana Twilight meet this Friday, but she knocked out a 17:49 at the Gretna meet on Saturday.
Caleb Larsen, Gretna
At that same Gretna meet, Class B #6 Caleb Larsen of Gretna won in 16:16. That's the fastest boys' time of the short week and yes, we've confirmed the course length is accurate.
If you think that cross country times should be compared without taking into account course difficulty, I present to you the East Butler course at Timber Point. I attended that meet on Thursday. The course featured a steep start up a gravel hill, 2.5 miles of up and down on a trail that was often barely wide enough for the ATV that was at the tail end of the race, and portions of the course were ravaged by rain erosion.
The funniest advice I heard in a pre-race huddle on Thursday was uttered by one of the competitors: "Pass people on downhills and uphills. If you pass someone on an uphill, they're like, 'why am I here, what am I doing with my life?'"
McKinley Mankin of Nebraska Christian had the biggest splash among freshmen this week, winning the St. Paul meet in 20:43. Aysha Neal, a freshman at Alma, won the Medicine Valley meet in 21:15. Bishop Neumann freshman Madelyn Barnard won the Logan View meet in 20:35. Class D freshmen Carter Mierau of McCool Junction (10:08 3k at his home course) and Braylon Kuncl of Mullen (18:22 at Sutherland) also had impressive starts.

Tri County athletes as far as the eye can see...
Class D Tri County competed at the mostly-Class B Norris meet. They placed four boys in the top 19 out of over 200 runners, finishing 2nd in a 12-team field. Their top five finishers ran below 18:11. They're going to be a problem for Class D teams.
The Class D Nebraska Christian girls placed four girls in the top five at the St. Paul meet, led by McKinley Mankin. All four girls ran under 21:45.
We love seeing big XC teams and were impressed by the size of the Palmyra HS and JH teams, the Syracuse HS boys team, and the Syracuse JH teams.

Comebacks and debuts

We saw a number of previously-injured athletes back on the course last week, plus a newbie who did well:

Ethan Smith of GINW only managed a few races last fall as he recovered from a broken foot. He took 2nd at the GINW 4k race in 13:03, six seconds behind Liam Gonzalez of Norfolk.
Gracie Suppes of Papio LaVista didn't compete in XC last year as she recovered from an injury. She ran a 20:05 at the Class of Metro, good for 1st among juniors and 4th overall.

Riley Campbell, Aquinas Catholic
Riley Campbell of Aquinas Catholic, ranked 13th in Class D, is running XC after playing softball her first two years of high school. She finished 2nd at the East Butler meet, two seconds behind Class C #9 Hailey Hengtgen of Palmyra.

Photos and social media

First off, the reason most people follow us is because our volunteer photographers take really good pictures, and then we share those pictures for free on our Facebook page. If you're not following our page at https://www.facebook.com/PrepRunningNerd/, now would be good time to start. If you're one of those parents who runs around the course hoping to get photos of your kid on your cell phone, you should be really happy when you see a Nerd at your meet. We screen our Nerds to make sure they have high quality equipment, and they are all committed to improving their photo skills each week.

If you know a Nerd was at your meet, the easiest way to find albums is to go to https://www.facebook.com/PrepRunningNerd/photos_albums. It usually takes us 2-7 days to post albums because of the editing process; some Nerds might take 5000 photos at a meet but only keep the 500 best. Each week we try to update the Pictures tab on our website at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/2022 to list the meets we've attended and give links to the FB albums. If you're wondering if we'll be at your meet this week, you can go to the Results/Cross Country tab on our website at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/xcresults to see where Nerds are headed.

In addition to Facebook, we're also active on X and Instagram at @PrepRunningNerd. Any non-media individual is free to use our photos without requesting permission. However, media entities must request permission to use our photos in newspapers, websites, etc.

At the end of this Nerdsletter, we list all of the meets for which we've posted photos in the past week.

Rankings

The coaches take care of periodic team rankings; aside from Top-5 predictions in our season previews, we leave the heavy lifting to them. We do post their team rankings on our Rankings tab as soon as they release them.

We are responsible for issuing weekly individual rankings that include the Top 15 and 5-10 additional athletes on our Nerd Watch List. Since XC courses vary in difficulty and often in length, rankings are more complex than just comparing times each week. Early in the season we take into account prior year results, with more weight given to the recent T&F season. As the season progresses, we give more credence to head-to-head matchups of other ranked athletes as well as race times on well-established courses (Kearney Country Club, Pioneer Park in Lincoln, Walnut Grove and Walnut Creek in Omaha, Platte River Rumble). Early in the season, you may see big movements up or down based on good or bad outcomes; later in the season you're less likely to see a big drop for one bad performance unless we're aware that a significant injury is the cause.

We're not out to break anyone's heart with a rankings drop or omission. If you think we're missing someone spectacular, drop us a polite DM or email (jayslagle@hotmail.com) and we'll investigate. Nebraska individual rankings have been issued for decades in an attempt to draw attention to the sport, and we inherited this task 3-4 years ago. Because we have the most comprehensive meet results in the State, often more complete than athletic.net, we track the performances for each athlete on our radar.

Rankings are typically released each Tuesday through State week. Because of some ill-timed vacation at Nerd HQ, we will not be issuing rankings the week of September 16. The rankings that should be released on September 23 may be a day or two late depending on how much Nerd admin work we're able to do on vacation. We'll post the rankings on the Rankings tab at our website and on our social media accounts.

Team ranking experiment

Joe Philippi, the Axtell XC coach, has crafted a mathematical approach to determine team rankings and, possibly, the introduction of wildcard spots for the State meet. This isn't an approved change to how teams qualify for State, but Joe is interested to see if there is a better way to rank and select teams. His database gives more weight to winning meets that have more teams and better teams. You can go to https://husker-xc-rankings.lovable.app/ and play around with the calculator. With so few results in the database, the rankings aren't going to be reliable quite yet, but we're interested to see how predictive they are of the teams that do qualify for State this year.

Big changes at the Junior High State meet

Before we explain the big changes, let's first explain that there is actually a Junior High State XC meet held each October at the Papio South course. This year's meet will be held on Saturday, October 11. We've attended the meet for the past five years and it's an awesome race day experience. In past years, there were four races: boys and girls Championship races, which attracted the most competitive teams from all four Classes, and boys and girls Open races, which skewed towards Class C and D teams. The meet is so popular - because it's so well run and because athletes come from all over the State - that the race sizes have gotten a bit too big for the 20-foot wide course.

Consequently, race organizers Jeremy Haselhorst and Shannon Stenger have decided - with positive feedback from coaches - to split the Championship Race into two divisions:

Class A/B Championships: This race is for schools whose middle school or junior high is connected to a Class A or B high school. They will follow the 'run 7, score 5' scoring format.
Class C/D Championships: This race is for schools whose middle school or junior high is connected to a Class C or Class D high school. They will follow the 'run 7, score 4' scoring format. These teams may choose to opt up to the Class A/B division if they would like.
Unattached athletes may still enter the Championship Races but they should follow the same categories as teams.
Open Race: For club teams and for teams with more than 7 athletes who want their 'second team' to participate. Open to grades 5-8. If the shift above results in smaller numbers for the Open Race, the girls and boys will race at the same time.

Teams or athletes interested in more information can find more information here:

https://jhaselhorst.wixsite.com/nestatejhxc

Season previews

New to cross country or just want to get up to speed on this season's best runners and teams? We've got that covered. We prepared eight season previews covering all four classes. They're posted on our Blog tab at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/blog. You might want to grab a drink before you dive in; our Word document was 40 pages long before we split the information into the eight articles.

Results

Each week on FB and X, we ask our followers to help us create the next week's meet schedule. Unlike the ball sports, the NSAA does not monitor meet schedules or collect meet results. Consequently, we list all of Nebraska's meets and the results (if we find them) at the Results/Cross Country tab on our website. You can find those results at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/xcresults.

Class of Metro compiled results

The Class of Metro meet is run by grade. If you're interested in the top performers at that meet, we've compiled them to reflect the boys under 17:30 and the girls under 21:00.

Martin Aringu, Omaha Central, 16:45, 11^th

Eli Bickley, Millard West, 16:51, 11^th

Hylan Caouette, Creighton Prep, 16:57, 12^th,

Aaron Robles, Creighton Prep, 16:56, 11^th

Finn Sully, Creighton Prep, 17:02, 12^th

Beckett Anderson, Millard North, 17:06, 11^th

Devin Neumann, Westside, 17:07, 11^th

Leveret Stricklett, Creighton Prep, 17:08, 10^th

Blake Sampson, Millard North, 17:09, 12^th

Peter Lickteig, Creighton Prep, 17:12, 9^th

Caleb Thome, Millard North, 17:14, 11^th

Gavin Leeper, Westside, 17:17, 10^th

Levi Riedel, Millard West, 17:20, 12^th

Liam Thoman, Millard West, 17:21, 10^th

Dillon Birge, Omaha Burke, 17:21, 12^th

Oliver Reeves, Millard North, 17:23, 10th

Marc Louthan, Millard North, 17:30, 12^th

Tatum Nielson, Bellevue West, 18:38, 12^th

Abbigail Durow, Millard South, 19:17, 12^th

Mabel Henningsen, Omaha Marian, 19:48, 10^th

Gracie Suppes, Papio LV, 20:05, 11th

Harper Cowles, Omaha Marian, 20:17, 11^th

Maya Freyer, Omaha Marian, 20:18, 10^th

Katelyn Sanne, Millard West, 20:20, 12^th

Sadie Osher, Millard West, 20:26, 11^th

Allyson Wilber, Millard West, 20:27, 10^th

Taia Green, Millard West, 20:29, 10^th

Natalie McGranaghan, Millard West, 20:35, 11th

Olivia McKlem, Millard West, 20:37, 12^th

Lena Sabata, Omaha Marian, 20:42, 10th

Tori Hillestad, Millard North, 20:46, 10^th

Julia Kubat, Omaha Marian, 20:49, 9th

Caitlin Steliga, Westside, 20:49, 11^th

Eliana Wittmann, Westside, 20:49, 12^th

Amalia Doty, Omaha Gross, 20:53, 12^th

Libby Frazer, Millard West, 20:54, 11^th

Tatum Houghton, Omaha Marian, 20:58, 9^th

Photos!

As of Monday night, we've posted albums for the following meets: Auburn, Burwell, Dundy County Stratton, East Butler, GINW, Gretna, McCool Junction, Norris, St. Paul, Scottsbluff and Weeping Water. We still owe you albums for Class of Metro, Hartington and Logan View. Here are a few shots from our albums:

********

First published at www.preprunningnerd.com by Jay Slagle on September 1, 2025. If you find an error, shoot us an e-mail at jayslagle@hotmail.com and we'll get it fixed.

Like this coverage of the Nebraska T&F and cross country scene? There's more of this at www.preprunningnerd.com. Check out the Blog tab for our frequent stories and the Results tab for every Nebraska high school meet we can find. If you want to see meet photos or just need to kill a few hours on social media, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @PrepRunningNerd or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/preprunningnerd.

Finally, if you think runners, jumpers and throwers are the best things on earth, you'll enjoy our two most popular articles. In 2018 we published "The Runner with the Broken Heart" about a high school boy who finished last in nearly every race he ran. In 2022 we published, "The Fall and Rise of Emmett " a story about a high school triple jumper who became a quadrapalegic after a swimming accident.