9/24/25 Nerdsletter

jayslagle
10 hours ago
9 min read

Contributor: The Nerd

Our apologies for a shorter Nerdsletter this week. Due to an ill-timed vacation, we're drinking water from a firehose, so this is the best we could do as we dig out of our backlog.

Community, family, faith

Part 1, Community

Cheza, a 7^th grader from O’Neill, didn’t plan to be a distance runner. It wasn’t a dream of hers. But in the first weeks of junior high, her PE coach encouraged students to try a sport, any sport, in order to experience the benefits of exercise and being part of a team. Her grandma was shocked when Cheza shared the big news, and her grandma’s face must have reflected a measure of skepticism and concern. Cheza’s reply: “It will be okay. I may never run the distance, I might not ever get to go to a meet, but I like the coaches and the kids who are out, and it will be good for me.”

Last Friday, Cheza ran in her first meet, a 2,500 meter race at O’Neill. She finished. Not fast, not last, but certainly one of the hardest things she’s done in her life.

The distance running community is filled with people who never win medals but gain so much more. Before she’d even joined the team, Cheza seemed to anticipate what we all know: the treasures of a cross country team are the people and self-discoveries that make every mile worth the struggle.

Part 2, Family

Speaking of struggles, Hemingford junior Teagen Thompson is no stranger to discomfort. A member of the 2023 Class D State championship team, she’s navigating a running career while managing her Type 1 diabetes. On September 12, the grueling Chadron course was too much for her, leading to the first DNF of her career. Four days later she raced again, this time at the Run the Rocks meet near Bridgeport. The weather forced organizers to run the high school boys and girls together, which allowed Teagen's brother (Gage, a freshman) to run with her for the entire race. Despite that support, Teagen's body failed her again. Her legs gave out fifteen feet from the finish line, but she continued to crawl toward the finish line before being disqualified after spectator attempted to assist her. At a hospital after the race, she and her family learned that she was suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis, a dangerous condition that, among other things, restricted blood flow to her muscles.

With advice from her doctor and a renewed dose of ambition, Teagen tackled the Alliance meet three days later. She ran well, recording the second fastest time of her career, just nine seconds off of her PR. She finished 15^th and medaled. Her family considers it a victory.

Part 3, Faith

We see a lot of race photos because, well, our Nerds take a lot of race photos. During the 2022 XC season I started to see pre-race prayer circles popping up from the western part of the State, usually led by a few North Platte St. Patrick’s athletes.

I reached out to Jarret Miles, a NPSP alum now competing at Concordia, and asked him for some background on the circle. He said that when he was in 6^th or 7^th grade, he first saw a pre-race prayer circle when he attended his older sister’s meet at either Cozad or Gothenburg. Once in high school, he developed friendships with runners from other schools while attending the FCA running camp held each summer in Kearney, and he realized that quite a few of his fellow runners were faith-filled. At the start of the 2022 season, he and teammates Andrew Brosius and Dimitri Pettit discussed starting a prayer circle. They talked to other teams and first introduced the circle at that season's Ravenna meet. During the 2023 season, Jarret’s senior year, they held a prayer circle before every meet.

The tradition has continued at NPSP but it has also grown. In the last two weeks we've watched pre-race circles at meets in Ravenna, Chase County, Norfolk, Milford and Fairbury. These are entirely led by high school students, and I’m thankful that adults have chosen to step out of the way.

I know we’ll hear from a few followers who think that religion and high school sports don’t mix. I disagree. I'm hopeful that the prayer circles are an indication that more of our youth are turning to faith, community and friendship to counter the toxicity of social media and political discourse. We’ve lost our way, and perhaps this group of teenagers has found the key to putting back on course.

Fast girls

Over the weekend Tony Chapman of Harvest Sports challenged me to put Avery Arens' race times into a historical perspective. In the freshman's first three races, she's run 17:06 (Augustana), 17:57 (Norfolk Catholic) and 17:37 (Norfolk). In addition to Arens, Cece Kramper of Duchesne has run 17:49 (Gretna) and 17:10 (Augustana), and Kori McClain ran 17:58 at Augustana.

We first covered the topic of fast girls in our 9/10/25 Nerdsletter when we noted that, prior to this season, only one Nebraska high school girl (Elli Dahl, 17:57, 2021 State meet) had broken the 18:00 barrier during the official high school season.

The 5,000 meter distance was introduced for Nebraska girls in 2013. I've reviewed the athletic.net results since that time and, after throwing out a few meet results that were clearly short of 5,000 meters, I found the following:

Year	Sub-19:00 girls	Fastest girl	School	Fastest time
2013	7	Jeralyn Poe	Lincoln North Star	18:14
2014	9	Jeralyn Poe	Lincoln North Star	18:15
2015	5	Taylor Somers	Millard South	18:31
2016	5	Rylee Rice	Ainsworth	18:06
2017	4	Anna Jennings	Papio South	18:18
2018	4	Elli Dahl	Fremont	18:24
2019	8	Elli Dahl	Fremont	18:35
2020	9	Stella Miner	Westside	18:11
2021	11	Elli Dahl	Fremont	17:58
2022	13	Mia Murray	Lincoln East	18:11
2023	9	Claire White	Westside	18:06
2024	8	Kendall Zavala	Norris	18:23
2025	9	Avery Arens	Crofton	17:06

So far this year, the sub-19:00 girls are Arens, Kramper, McClain, Tatum Neilson of Bellevue West (18:16), Emily Hegge of Papio South (18:27), Abbi Durow of Millard South (18:43), Delani Runnels of Niobrara-Verdigre (18:52), Emma Steffensen of Waverly (18:53) and Katie Johnson of Grand Island (18:58). Based on each school's historical meet schedules, we think all of these girls except Arens and Runnels will be competing at the UNK meet next Monday.

An interesting footnote to the research I did: Millard South's Katie Spencer, who went on to compete at Oklahoma State, was a perfect 12-for-12 in sub-19:00 results during the two seasons (2013-2014) in which she competed at the 5k distance. Mia Murray, who competed at Lincoln East, appears to have the most sub-19:00 results; she broke the mark 17 times out of 23 attempts during her three years (2021-2023) of competition, including all eight races her junior year.

Rankings mayhem

Due to our ill-timed vacation to Switzerland, this week's individual rankings reflected two weeks of results. Unfortunately, the results were often conflicting. We had several girls who had one bad result after three impressive performances and, in those cases, we tended to put less weight on the bad result. We had a number of athletes who didn't compete at one or two races, and that gave us pause. We had different results in head-to-head races: for instance, Joe Majerus and David Krier of Pius beat each other once during the period, with Krier winning the Harold Scott title by just 0.3 seconds over Majerus.

At the end of the day, the rankings are subjective. We did our best to make them fair but we don't have the brain power to make them perfect. The UNK meet on Monday will give us a good look at the many of the top teams in each Class, and those results will be in our next rankings.

You can find our rankings for the entire season at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/rankings. That link also includes the almost-weekly coaches' rankings for each Class.

Results

We're still searching for the meet results for the Arcadia-Loup City meet held on 9/9 but we've collected the results for every other meet held in the last two weeks. You can find those results at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/xcresults. Of note, this week's rankings don't include the results from Boyd County and Neligh-Oakdale since we got those after the rankings were completed.

Notable results

The Lincoln North Star boys continue to impress as the top-ranked team in Class A. At their three meets thus far, they have finished 1-2-3-6-7 (Seward), 2-3-4-26-32 (Nike Preview) and 2-3-4-9-10 (Norfolk).

The Tri County boys, ranked #1 in Class D, keep proving they belong there. In their four meets, they've finished 2nd behind Elkhorn in two mostly-Class-B meets, handily won the Class C/D Fairbury meet, and on Thursday won the Fillmore Central meet that included three of the top six teams in Class C.
The Gretna girls moved to the top spot in Class B this week after another convincing performance. So far this season they've won their small home meet, finished 2nd behind Class A #1 Millard West at the Burke meet, finished 3rd behind Elkhorn North and Pius at the Platte River Rumble, and then topped all of three of those teams to win the Harold Scott meet last week.
Tatum Nielson of Bellevue West won her first three meets of the season before finishing behind Avery Arens of Crofton at the Norfolk meet. She's currently ranked 2nd in Class A and should square off against top-ranked Emily Hegge of Papio South at next Monday's UNK meet. Emily has won her first four meets this year.
The Fremont Twilight meet on 9/12 included junior high races won by two athletes who should make an impact once they reach high school. Jenna Dahl, an 8th grader at Fremont, won the 2500-meter girls' race in 10:11 while Levi Bowen, a 7th-grader at Fort Calhoun, won the boys race in 9:08. Jenna finished 8th at the State JH championship race last fall while Levi won the State JH open race as a 6th grader.
Kamden Cupples has had an equally impressive start to his 8th-grade season. He started the season with a 10:46 win over 3200 meters in Glenwood before capturing 3000-meter titles at the Platte River Rumble (10:11) and PAL Tupper meet at Walnut Grove (9:37). On the girls side, Madison Scott of Russell Middle School won the PRR title in 11:28 and the Liberty JH title in 11:43.
At Saturday's Greeno-Dirksen collegiate meet, the top local finishers in the men's 8k race were Austin Carrera (Hastings, Wichita State) in 25:04 and Nick Abdalla (Omaha South, UNK) in 25:09. UNK had the three fastest finishers among Nebraska natives in the women's 5k race: Ella Buhlke (Central City, 17:59), Kassidy Stuckey (York, 18:02) and Abigal Burger (Kearney, 18:04).

This and that

The University of Kansas announced that the KU Relays will not be held next spring and, at this point, there is no plan to hold the meet in the future. Until COVID, the KU Relays included national-level college competition and high-caliber regional high school athletes. A three-year hiatus for COVID decimated the quality of the collegiate field, and the financial pressures brought on by NIL payments and the House settlement have apparently made the KU Relays an easy expense to eliminate.

We first wrote about Andrew and Michael Sauer in the fall of 2023. The twins were the 6th and 7th runners on a strong Creighton Prep team but did not expect to have an impact on Prep's chances at the State meet. However, the scoring was tied after counting the first five runners for Prep and Fremont. The tiebreaker in these cases is to award the team title to the team with the highest-placing sixth man, and Andrew's 39th-place finish clinched the title for Prep. With high school PRs of 4:46/10:03 (Andrew) and 4:41/10:02 (Michael), the late-blooming twins weren't hotly-pursued athletic recruits. Andrew stayed close to home at Creighton while Michael headed to Xavier in Cincinnati, but neither gave up their dreams of competing in college. After both recorded sub-15:30 5k times this spring, they were invited to join on to their colleges' cross country teams. Andrew has been Creighton's second finisher in its first two meets while Xavier has yet to run its full squad a meet this season.
Jack Polerecky won the 2014 Class A 3200 title while competing for Creighton Prep, and he later ran for Loyola Marymount. He now lives in Arizona and has a part-time job coaching high-caliber athletes, including Julia Paternain of Uruguay, who finished 3rd in the marathon at the recent World Athletics meet in Tokyo.
Steve Magness provided a link to an interesting (and free) Washington Post article about how African distance runners are recruited to US colleges. If you have haven't noticed, many D1 colleges have moved their recruiting focus from high-potential high school athletes to much older international athletes. The link to the article is at https://archive.ph/6sS9q.

Photos

We've taken a ton of photos since our last Nerdsletter and our website listing at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/2022 is updated through Tuesday morning for the 56 meets we've posted so far this year. A less convenient way to find our albums is to go to https://www.facebook.com/PrepRunningNerd/photos_albums you can see a full listing of our albums. I will work on updating the Photo tab of our website to reflect all of the albums we've posted.

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First published at www.preprunningnerd.com by Jay Slagle on September 24, 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.