With few girls, boys will carry Mustangs

COSTA MESA — It was time to go to the mountains again.

Nine boys, four girls, one coach and one counselor went up to Lake Arrowhead and rented a cabin in August to bond, eat healthy and run.

Coach Mike Sciacca is hoping the weeklong trip will help the Costa Mesa High boys’ and girls’ cross country teams be competitive this year.

Everyone got along, and the runners are making better decisions about food, but Sciacca still sees one thing missing. Well, more than one.

The numbers are low on the girls’ team.

“I’m not sure why,” said the second-year coach. “Maybe it’s because our guy team is a little weird.”

Sciacca is joking, of course. The drop from 14 to five, just enough to score in a girls’ team race, is because a handful of runners graduated, while others were lost to injuries.

Also, Sciacca is by himself this year. Girls’ cross country coach Sarah Nguyen is taking a year off from coaching. Sciacca said Nguyen had a little girl, her first child.

Sciacca has a little one around, too.

At just 10 months old, Dylan goes wherever dad does. Having Dylan around has boosted the team’s morale during practices.

“All the kids love him,” said Sciacca of his only child. “It’s kind of a family atmosphere. I could take a step away and they would pick him up and take care of him. They had a contest to see who he liked the best.”

So far Dylan hasn’t picked anyone. Sciacca said he’s probably waiting to see how the runners do this year.

The boys are bound to improve on last year’s third-place finish in the Orange Coast League. Twenty showed up to run, a large amount which made it possible to form a solid varsity team, an actual junior varsity team and frosh/soph one. Three runners ran JV last year.

Junior Drake Burnett will most likely take the No. 1 spot, ahead of James Stucker, a sophomore. The former third and fourth runners stepped in after Mitch Friedmann graduated.

Jason Rosello also returns, along with fellow juniors Rumman Razzak and John Sudbeck. After the top five, Sciacca said the other two spots are wide open.

“I think we’re going to have a good team because we have like eight juniors who are really close,” Sciacca said. “Last year we had about five runners that were varsity [caliber] runners.”

The girls just have five runners on varsity, which will make it tough to go through a season. One injury and the team will suffer greatly.

The program is a long way away from finding the success it found in 1997, when Costa Mesa won a state title.

Last year’s top runner, Emily Cotton, is gone after being the Mustangs’ lone representative at the CIF Southern Section preliminaries.

Emily Bowman graduated. Two promising runners in sophomore Wendi Way and junior Courtney Green are lost for the season with ankle and knee injuries, respectively.

The lone returnees are junior Cheyenne Lopez and senior Alyssa Nunez. Senior Arlene Sanchez and freshman Melissa Townsend are both new. The two are slated as the top two runners, with Nunez, Cheyenne and sophomore Brittany Way, Wendi’s twin, taking up the final spots.

“It’s obviously a rebuilding year, but Arlene has enormous amount of talent,” Sciacca said.. “She can run competitively on the college level. Arlene is capable of going on her own to [the CIF Southern Section preliminaries].

“I don’t know what it was that brought her out for cross country. She just said it’s her last year and she wanted to do cross country.”