Rocha Breaks Top 10 at Foot Locker Nationals

Not only did Catarina Rocha celebrate her 17th birthday on Saturday, the Peabody High junior became just the sixth female runner from Massachusetts to ever finish in the Top 10 for the Foot Locker Cross Country National Championships and only the second Tanner City young lady to do so.

Rocha blazed into a seventh place finish Saturday morning in San Diego’s Balboa Park at 17:38, just two seconds behind fellow New Englander Abbey Leonardi of Kennebunkport, Maine, who finished fourth. Rocha’s time was also nearly a whole minute better than her effort last year at the championship race – .

Rocha came into the race with a third place in the Northeast Regional race and as the , although the Foot Locker competition is not affiliated with the MIAA.

The first Peabody female to rank so highly in the competition was Leslie Welch who clocked in eighth place at 18:20 back in 1979, the first year the championship race was held, in fact, according to the historical records published by Foot Locker. Back then, the race went by a different name, although it was still held in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

“The first Kinney Cross Country Championships (KCCC) National Finals was held before a relatively small crowd of curious onlookers in Balboa Park. There was no uniformity for the runners; competitors wore their own uniforms. Regional races were scattered over the calendar: Houston and New York (October), Chicago (November) and San Francisco and Atlanta (December). Brent Steiner and Ellen Lyons were the inaugural Kinney Champions,” reads a brief paragraph summarizing the race.

Between Welch and Rocha, the only other Bay State ladies to place in the Top 10 in that span of 32 years were Thayer Plant of Cambridge in 1982 (17:24, 7th), Mary Cobb of Pittsfield in 1994 (17:17, 3rd), Erin Dromgoole of Millbury in 1996 (18:24, 10th) and Natasha Roetter of Lexington in both 2000 (17:29, 4th) and 2001 (17:05, 3rd).