Rinke finishes fourth

Milaca Mega Meet The North Branch girls cross country team finished an impressive fifth place at the Class AAA varsity race during the gigantic Milaca Mega Meet last week. The Lady Vikes were just beat out by Big Lake, who scored 14 points better than them. As has been the case this season, North Branch was paced by Rhianna Rinke. The eighth-grader blasted her personal best time, running the course in 14:41. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t even broken 15 minutes. That time was good enough for fourth place out of 149 runners. She was bested by a senior from Big Lake and a pair of juniors, one from Monticello and one from Hill-Murray. Rinke’s performance was backed up by Casey Hovland and Haley Huset. The two juniors had a phenomenal race, also breaking personal best times. Hovland finished in 18th place with a time of 15:44 and Huset finished in 21st place with a time of 15:53. The varsity squad was rounded out with Cassidy White in 44th place with a time of 16:35 and Claire Schraufnagel in 82nd place with a time of 17:32. As a team, North Branch scored 169 points. Monticello won the event with 67 points, Sartell-St. Stephen was second with 103 points, Chaska was third with 106 and Big Lake was fourth with 155. Head Coach Anna Geary was thrilled with the results the girls produced. “All the girls had their season best times at this course and were all just thrilled to hit some key benchmarks,” she said. “Claire Schraufnagel and Laura Dolezalek both had huge PR’s on the course. The two worked together on the race course and pushed each other to over 40 second personal bests.” Boys The boys had a bit tougher go of it, finishing 17th place in the 24 team field. Their best finisher was senior Ean Charpentier in 50th place with a time of 17:41. Zach Peno and Kyle Granger paced each other stride-for-stride in the race as they finished 86th and 87th, respectively. Peno in 18:29.0 and Granger in 18:29.9. Jake Petrik and Alex Fitcha had the fourth and fifth scores for NB. Petrik was in 103rd place with an 18:51 while Fitcha was in 108th place with a 19:01.