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Brooke Coffman is eligible to return for two more years after reaching regionals this season as a sophomore. JEFF LOWE | DISPATCH RECORD
Brooke Coffman led Lampasas at cross country regionals, placing 33rd in a 135-girl race in Lubbock on Tuesday.
Although her finish would have been enough to qualify for regionals in a normal year, this year the number of state qualifiers was reduced to cut down on crowd size at the state meet.
The top three teams and the next 10 individuals who are not on those teams advance to state. In past years, the top four teams and top 15 individuals advanced. Coffman was in the top 15th individually, not counting runners on the top four teams: Canyon, Decatur, Argyle and Dumas.
Coffman posted a time of 13:49.5.
Raelean Sutton finished 69th with a time of 14:39.8.
Cody Hinson placed 74th as the Badgers’ only qualifier in the boys’ race, which had 125 runners. His time was 19:11.8.
San Elizario was the top boys’ team.
Hinson “had a better back half of the course,” coach Kiff Wiemers said. “But he did a phenomenal job … He’d been chasing [regionals] for two years. For him just to get to regionals and finally get that monkey off the back had to be a good feeling.”
As a sophomore and as a junior, Hinson finished one place shy of advancing from district to regionals.
He is a senior this year, as is Sutton.
Coffman is a sophomore.
Coffman often paces herself in competition against Tasha Thoms of Gatesville. This week, Coffman got boxed in close to the start of the race and was not able to finish as close to Thoms as she planned. Thoms was the eighth overall finisher with a time of 13:02.
Overall, Lampasas’ times may have been a little slower than planned, but Wiemers said, “I’m ecstatic. This year I had a lot of kids buy in. A lot of those kids [on the team] are new … Our district is state-level quality.”
The weather turned out to be a lot better than it looked when the Badgers first got to the site.
Wiemers said they pulled up at 9 a.m. with about 32-degree temperatures and 15-20 mph winds.
But by the actual race time, the temperature was close to 60, and the wind died down to 5 mph or so, for very good race conditions.
“I thought it was a great race. That was a hard course,” Wiemers said. “I’ve heard of a hill in Lubbock … I didn’t know where the hills were. ...The course was definitely harder than Corpus Christi.”
Corpus Christi is the Region IV site where Lampasas competed last year.