BIG-TIME RUNNER

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ABOVE: Charlie Watson leads the St. Helena boys cross country team at Six Sigma Ranch and Winery in Lower Lake on Oct. 17.

St. Helena High cross country has one of its biggest teams ever, 12 boys and 11 girls not deterred by sweltering heat, led by one of its best runners ever in junior Corinna Schlatter.

Schlatter didn't run in the Saints' most recent team competition, the second North Central League I Meet on the 2.6-mile course at Six Sigma Ranch and Winery in Lower Lake on Oct. 17.

She was resting up before heading to Southern California for the 44th annual Woodbridge Cross Country Classic at Great Park in Irvine. It paid off Saturday night, near the end of the two-day meet, when she ran a personal record time of 18:08.5 to place 21st out of 218 runners in the Gold Varsity Girls-A Division.

It was the second-best time in school history behind Harper McClain's 16:23.9 in 2019, when the future University of Oregon standout was a junior herself.

Schlatter had to sit out her sophomore track season this past spring due to injuries, and is having fun competing again.

"This year's been really fun to connect with the team and everything," she said. "It's been super fun to have the team together. The camaraderie has been super fun and nice, and being an upperclassman and kinda leading the team.

"I really like how the season has been going. I'm coming off injuries from track season, but so far so good. I'm looking to do better things throughout the season and to try to do my best at state this year. I'll be doing track, too, definitely. The mile and the two-mile are my specialties, I guess, and I'll maybe dabble in the 800, which I haven't yet in high school. I'd really like to go into running in college."

Schlatter was first in the Coastal Mountain Conference Championship meet last year, fourth in Division 5 at the North Coast Section Championships in Hayward, and 26th in Division 5 at the CIF State Championships in Fresno.

"If all goes as planned and she stays healthy, Corinna will for sure go to the section meet and we predict that she'll do really well there and qualify for the state meet," St. Helena head coach Sarah Herdell said. "She's training really hard to get there, so that's the plan.

She said probably 10 to 12 Saints will qualify for the NCS meet.

"We aren't competitive as a team there, just because we're up against Division 5 schools that have under 500 or 600 students and have really strong cross country, track and swim programs because they don't have as many organized sports," she said. "Sonoma Academy is really good at cross country because they don't have all the other sports that we do. You have to have all of your runners finishing in the top 25 at the section meet to qualify for state, so it's pretty hard.

"Corinna will qualify for state as an individual. It'll be hard, but we have faith that she is doing everything she needs to do correctly to get there. She's been fun to watch. She works really hard, training before and after school."

Schlatter sitting out the Oct. 17 league meet gave someone else a chance to win. She had won the first one by more than four minutes a week before on the 3.1mile course at Noyo Headlands Park in Fort Bragg. The course record holder, she ran a 19:04 and the runner-up from Middletown was 4:21 behind her.

Lower Lake was much hotter. Evelyn Falsini, a junior who played soccer and basketball at Trinity Prep before transferring to St. Helena this year, led the Saints with a ninth-place time of 23:28. Savanna Hardcastle, a sophomore, was 10th in 23:29, followed by her sister, junior Summer Hardcastle, with a 12th-place time of 23:34.

"This is Evelyn's first time ever doing a running race and she was our first girl, so that was really exciting to see," Herdell said. "I've been really enjoying watching Savanna and Summer this year. They clearly put in some work this summer with conditioning and training. You can definitely see it out on the course."

The Saints also had junior Alondra Calderon (31:47) and freshman Gioia Rombi (33:37) in the race.

Charlie Watson led the St. Helena boys with a h-place time of 16:00 in the 31-runner race in Lower Lake.

"It felt really tiring, much more than other races," the sophomore said. "This is probably the most tiring cross country race I've run because of the heat. It's a relatively at course, but it was hot and dusty. This was only my second meet of the year and I have so many more to come."

The Saints also had freshmen Olympic Dodd (seventh, 16:19), Lucas Zuniga (17:39) and Raul Ramirez Ambrocio (17:44), sophomores Joey Grasser-Hoskins (18:38), Matthew Viader (19:02) and Jesus Ramirez (21:07), and senior James Feeney (27:11).

Watson was fourth and Dodd sixth in Fort Bragg on Oct. 10.

The NCL I has four more nine-school meets in the regular season before the Coastal Mountain Conference Championships on Nov. 6 at Spring Lake Regional Park in Santa Rosa. Then it's the North Coast Section Championships at Hayward High.

"It's a bit of a stretch, but it would really be a personal achievement if I qualified for the state championships in the next two years," Watson said. "I think that's the next thing to shoot for in my running career. I think I can do it if I put in a lot of work. It takes a significant amount of training. I do track in the spring and a lot of running on my own in the summer, and I also ski competitively, so some of the conditioning for that transfers over to running."

Watson is also one of the Saints' top track and field athletes, competing in the 800, 1600 and 3200 and pole vault. In fact, he noted that Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis had cleared 20 feet, 8 inches to break his own world record in the event at the world championships in Tokyo two days before.

"That's insane. I'm definitely not there yet," quipped Watson, whose PR as a freshman last spring was 8 feet. "But if I keep training and training, I can surprise myself, how much I can increase in a year. Whereas running is more about conditioning, pole vaulting is more about perfecting the technique. This going to be my year for pole vaulting."

Herdell was asked what she thinks draws student-athletes to cross country as opposed to football or volleyball in the fall.

"It's an individual sport, so for kids who maybe aren't so much interested in team sports or kids that didn't have any prior experience in team sports, it's a good option for them, especially if they came from a school that didn't have athletics in middle school," she said. "Sometimes they're just not as experienced and comfortable with that.

"I do feel that we tend to get kids that are really driven and focused, which is pretty characteristic of a runner. We also get a lot of students who are thinking ahead about training and conditioning for winter sports like basketball, soccer and wrestling."

The team practices around the campus and on St. Helena streets for the most part, and also does hill repeats on White Sulphur Springs Road.

"But that's all on pavement," the coach said. "If we can do off-campus runs out at Bothe (Bothe-Napa Valley State Park) or (Lake) Hennessey, it's better. This year we'll go to Las Posadas (State Forest in Angwin) for an off-campus practice just to get that trail training in."

Some of the Saints also trained in the weight room over the summer.

"We'll do workouts for runners, like shin splint prevention and strengthening hips, knees and other joints, and not so much to bulk up," she said. "We do a lot of stretching and foam rolling and we'll throw in some yoga sometimes, just trying to build well-rounded runners."

The next NCL I meet is Oct. 1, also at Six Sigma. ■

Dave Mosher contributed to this story.

You can reach Sports Editor Andy Wilcox at andy.wilcox@napanews.com or 707-256-2220.