Assistant coach Tracy Williams blows the whistle to signify changing from a jog to a hard run.

Lindsey Meyers and Heidi Matthews at practice.

Coach Jim Stoverink looks on at practice Wednesday.

Doug Cary runs the hard workout on Wednesday.

Avery "Ace" Kohm, Matt Hale, Blake Popp and Steven Adams running at practice.

Scott Mangells keeping pace at practice.

Coach Jim Stoverink has been coaching cross country at Jackson for 10 years. His best finish has been a girls second place at the 4A state finals and the boys team finished 13th overall at state.

With six Jackson alumni running in college programs around the state and region, Stoverink's cross country program has been successful.

So far the girls team has run well at their meets this season, but the boys team has been sporadic.

"We are a young girls team with only two seniors, but they are competing real well. Our boys are up and down. We haven't been able to put five guys together that will run strong," Stoverink said.

For the girls team, Julie Wunderlich, freshman, is running real well along with Sarah Schlick who is also a freshman.

Two sophomores, Sarah Stiegmeyer and Jennifer Brown are running well in meets so far this season.

"We have lots of other girls that we move back and forth from meet to meet which gives us good depth and an outstanding JV team," Stoverink said.

On the boys team Mark Proffer, senior, has been running well for the season. Two juniors Lucas Bolinger and Mark Sander have ran well. Sander has been consistently good, while Bolinger so far lacks consistency at meets. He runs in the number one and two spots for the team.

Steven Adams is a consistent sophomore that runs in the second or third spot for the team.

It takes hard work, training, stamina and dedication to compete in cross country running.

"If you want to be a good cross country runner you have to put in miles in the off-season and you'll need to gradually build up each day," Stoverink said.

When the season starts coach Stoverink hopes that his team is up to running five to six miles a day. Then he tries to build on their mileage.

After that the team has easy/hard workouts throughout the season.

At Jackson, Monday through Wednesday the team works on short hard runs for the hard workouts and on Thursday they do an easy workout.

They run long easy miles on Thursday and after every workout the team cools down by jogging a mile.

All of this is needed to prepare the runners for the state meet and the other later season meets that are 5K or 3.1 mile long races.

In varsity cross country seven runners are allowed to run and the best five runners will make up the teams score.

The low score in cross country wins because it is made up of the total of adding the place that each runner finished. The lowest score possible in cross country is 15 with a first, second, third, fourth and fifth place finish on your team.

Also, cross country allows for individual competition along with team competition. Medals are giving out the first 20 to 40 runners depending on the size of the meet.

"There's always someone that is going to be slower than you in cross country," Stoverink said.

That gives something for the slower runners to be proud of when they beat somebody else.

Jackson ran at Carbondale yesterday and no scores were available at press time.

Next week they will travel to Marshall Co., Ky., for a meet.

After that the team will have a Conference meet followed by the district meet, sectional meet and finally the state meet.

The top four schools at district will qualify for the sectionals and also individual runners that qualify will go onto the sectionals.

The top four teams from the sectional meet will qualify for state and so will the top 25 individual runners.

At state there will be around 160 runners. Amy Stoverink is the only returning state runner for Jackson.