Youth runs wild for Niwot cross country in Longs Peak League Meet

A whopping seven Niwot cross country underclassmen — girls and boys combined — had a top-10 finish in the Longs Peak League Meet on Oct. 12.

On the boys’ side, Cougar freshman Rocco Culpepper led all runners with a time of 15 minutes, 18.9 seconds which was about 23 seconds ahead of Severance’s Caden Schweer. Niwot seniors Carlos Kipkorir Cheruiyot and Jeremy Gillet finished third and fourth, respectively, while sophomore Keegan Geldean (fifth), senior Frederick Ambrose (sixth) and sophomores Christopher Wood (seventh) and Gavin Engtrakul (ninth) followed with top-10 finishes.

Aided by that rush of green and white all crossing the finish line nearly together, the Niwot boys scored the fewest points (19) to win the meet.

Head coach Kelly Christensen was once again amazed by Culpepper, whom he believes to be the fastest freshman he’s ever coached at Niwot.

“He's not a normal human,” Christensen said. “He's a great teammate, a great leader and he's a kid, through and through. He kind of overdoes everything he does like a teenage boy does, and there's positives and negatives to that, but we are very fortunate to have Rocco on our team.”

Niwot’s next fastest runner during the meet, Kipkorir Cheruiyot, has also been finding his stride this season. Christensen said his senior runner visited family in Kenya over the summer and that experience has helped him considerably.

The girls were even more dominant in their team win as the top eight runners were all Cougars: sophomore Bella Nelson, freshman Addison Ritzenhein, junior Mia Prok, freshman Anna Prok, junior Olivia Alessandrini, senior Lex Bullen, junior Cayden Justice and freshman Avalon Beltran (in order of finish).

Nelson ran a 17:47.5 to finish just 2.2 seconds ahead of Ritzenhein. The team had a perfect score of 15 points.

“Bella (Nelson) has always just been who she is and finds a way to level-up on race day and run for her team hard,” Christensen said. “It's super encouraging with younger athletes doing that.”

Similar to Culpepper, Ritzenhein was previously unsure if she wanted to run cross country in high school, but Christensen is glad she is now one of his top athletes. “To see her fall in love with running and enjoy the sport with her teammates and turn into an extremely competitive athlete is real exciting,” Christensen said.

Looking at the big picture, the Niwot girls have now won four consecutive races to create some substantial momentum ahead of the Oct. 29 state championships. But first, Niwot will send nine boys and nine girls to the 4A Region 3 meet in Arvada on Oct. 20.

“We just need to make it a hard effort,” Christensen said. “We don't want to go into State without having a race with hard effort and then just think we can flip the switch next week. It's never worked out well in the past when we just ghost through regionals. We've got to make sure we go out there and push our bodies and then we can recover a little bit after the regional meet to get ready for State.”