Time will tell if the Emmaus girls cross country team gained wisdom at the 2018 PIAA Cross Country Championships on Nov. 3 in Hershey.

Coach Kelly Bracetty’s young squad (six of the seven runners at states were underclassmen) finished with 382 points, good for 16th overall out of 19 schools in the Class 3A results. The Green Hornets’ average time was 21 minutes and 21 seconds.

“Today was a good learning experience for the girls team,” said Bracetty. “This was their first state meet for many of them. They really didn’t know what to expect at the start.”

Sophomore Keerstin Augustin led the Green Hornets, finishing 84th overall out of 228 participants with a time of 20 minutes and 58 seconds. She was followed by freshman Isabella Lees, who claimed the 145th overall position with a time of 21:46. Next was sophomore Kera Reinhard, who took 156th place with a time of 21:54. Sophomore Clara Kennedy finished eight seconds behind Reinhard at 22:02, which was good for 166th overall.

Runners Madison Torretta, a freshman, Amanda LaVana, a senior, and Ashleigh McNellis, a sophomore, constituted the remainder of the Green Hornet finishers, coming in 186th, 197th and 206th overall. Torretta registered a time of 22:25 seconds. LaVana was 20 seconds behind at 22:45 seconds, and McNelllis at 23:04.

“I told them to get out fast and make sure it was a quick start,” the coach said. “But unfortunately being a very muddy and sloppy course out there, they kind of got pulled to the back at the start.

“You can tell them until you are blue in the face ‘you gotta get out fast,’ but until they actually go out there and make that mistake for themselves, they’re not going to learn.”

Slowly, the girls recovered from the slow start.

“They had to spend the rest of the course trying to make up some ground the rest of the race, which they did,” Bracetty said. “They were able to move up nicely over the next two to three miles and mix in with some other runners from the Lehigh Valley.”

In preparing for the competition, Bracetty jogged and walked the course with her team the day before the race.

“I had them visualize which part of the course they would have to be a bit tougher mentally,” she said.

There were already ominous signs for the deteriorating course at that time.

“We knew that when we jogged that course it was already starting to look a mess with the mud,” she said. “We knew that there was going to be some more rain that night. With those kind of conditions you can’t really focus on time, you have to focus more on effort and place, so I tried to instill that in them.”

Then came Friday night’s downpour, which further compromised the course. Some areas where Bracetty instructed her team to be good places to pass runners resembled a hog wallow.

“They did have to wind up going wide around a lot of turns, which made them run a little bit further,” Bracetty said. “But it prevented injury or having them wipe out.

“This type of experience for the underclassmen is invaluable. Not only can they now know what to expect in years to come, but they can share that wisdom with future runners, who will also join them in the next couple of years.