Urbandale Girls Off to Slow Start

The Urbandale girls cross country team has been something of a dynasty for a decade under 13-year head coach Dan Davis.

They've finished in the top ten teams at state, for seven straight seasons. In 2007, they finished second and last season they finished sixth.  

"We struggled early," said Davis of the 2011 season. "It was kind of a wake-up call for us the first couple meets to realize how much better the entire state has gotten in girls cross country."

Davis said he believes this year has the best crop ever of Iowa girls cross country runners.

"I'm not really sure why, it's probably just a good class coming through," said Davis. "The sport has grown a lot, most teams used to have 10 or 20 kids. Now there's more teams with 75, even 100 kids. This sport has just grown a lot. That's probably where it's coming from."

Senior captain Norma Penado is running her fourth year of varsity, She said Coach Davis wouldn't even tell the girls where they finished after the seson's first meet at Ames. Still, she's confident the team will get where they want to be.

"We're definitely going to improve a lot more," said Penado. "We started out really rocky. I think we just need to build confidence, especially in our younger runners. We're building up to that and we always end up doing really well in the end."

Those younger runners will be integral to this year's team; four of the seven girls to run at state last season were freshman. One of them is now-sophomore Ashley Norem. She placed 20th at the state meet last season as a freshman, that was the best showing on the team.

"She's one of the hardest workers we have," said Davis. "She's just one of those kids who's going to go out and try to run people down every meet. I expect pretty big things out of her this season."

The team boasts a nice variety of upperclassmen and younger runners. And according to Penado it also boasts a wide range of personalty types as well. And that's a positive thing.

"We have a lot of people from different cliques in cross country and that's kind of a cool thing," said Penado. "It used to be you might think it was just a bunch of nerds who like to run, but no, there's actually people from all over and that makes it really awesome."

The girls will compete next on Thursday at the Indianola Invitational at Pickard Park.