SLIDESHOW: See pictures of the meet
SALT LAKE CITY -- Dreams come true and hearts are broken at the state meet. Ogden's Avery Calton gave herself a dream come true fairytale ending to her freshman year of cross country by running the second fastest time of the day and winning the 4-A girls state championship, helping her team to a second place finish overall.
One week ago Calton bubbled to the top of the Region 5 championships, where she beat top state runner Kelsey Braithwaite, a Box Elder sophomore who has been first or second in every big invitational this year. Calton had been placing in the top fifteen at big invites, but she hadn't pulled off a win like that. Was Calton's success a fluke? Was Braithwaite sick? How did it happen?
Calton answered those questions with a solid, smart win. She's no fluke and it doesn't matter how healthy her competition is, she can beat them.
"It's so surreal," said Calton. "I'd say 10 yards after the curve I was like, 'She can't catch me. This is mine.' This is something I'd never trade."
A tight pack through almost two and a half miles of the three mile race kept coaches and spectators guessing. Calton said she had told herself all week that a championship was a possibility.
"The whole week I've been thinking, 'Just run your own race. You have it. You have it,'" she said. During the race she kept talking to herself.
"I was like, 'Avery you can't run your own race, because you can't hold back. You have to run their race and then beat them in the end.' In the end I really did run my own race and that's how I know how to run," said Calton.
In the jump to 4-A, Ogden didn't know how they'd hold out as a team, but they stormed the ranks and proved the girls cross country team can handle the heat. Behind Calton, Jamie Stokes (19:30) was 12th with Megan Madsen 17th (19:45), Marae Wright 28th (20:21) and Aubrey Barton 32nd (20:29) to score 85 points behind Mountain View's 38 and just ahead of Timpanogos' 98.
"We haven't really known what to expect going into it, but I think we've done really well this year," said Stokes. "We're really happy with it."
Braithwaite was fifth overall in 18:55.
5-A
It took Meghan Hedquist 555 miles to win a state championship in the 3-mile cross country race. She wrote the number on her arm yesterday to remind herself during the race how many miles she ran this summer. And that outward sign of her inner conviction won the Davis junior her first state cross country title.
While the Darts fell to a hard hitting American Fork to take second place with a score of 81 to the Fork's 32, Hedquist herself refused to fall. At the beginning of the race American Fork's Morgan Warner and Alexis Laws pushed to an early lead, opening up before photography hill, the first major hill in the race where runners catapult through a gauntlet of photographers and spectators.
Hedquist just kept her head.
"I knew that if I just stayed close enough to the leaders that by about the second mile I could start to go harder and try to catch all of them. And well, that's what happened," said Hedquist. "I was a lot more tired than I thought I would be by then, but I knew that I had to go then or I wouldn't have a chance of catching them."
Her move to the front started to cost her as she rounded the pond for the final half mile, but it was a price she paid to come out on top.
"I started to be really tired," said Hedquist. "I just knew that I had to keep trying to make it stronger and harder so that they wouldn't catch up. It was tough. My arms always die. By the end I can't even lift my arms."
Hedquist held off a hard charging Laws and Warner to run the course in 18:50. American Fork's Kaisja Angerhofer was fourth and Weber's Karlee Deeter, a sophomore, rounded out the top 5, running a 19:05.
Davis's other scoring runners were Jessica Wilding (19:09) in sixth, Anni Andersen (20:04) in 22nd, Emily Hansen(20:11) in 25th, and Abby Frodsham (20:22) in 30th.
Syracuse was third overall in the race, scoring 142. They were led by Hannah Williams' (19:21) ninth-place finish.
3-A
Bear River High School girls cross country placed fifth overall, their highest finish in school history and the highest finish by a top of Utah high school in 4A. The race was dominated by Park City, a nationally ranked team that placed all five scoring runners in the top ten, and all seven runners in the top twelve.
For Bear River Emily Pickett and Abby Thornley lead the charge placing 18th in 20:50 and 19th in 20:54, respectively. Morgan was ninth overall and Ben Lomond placed 15th.
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