Rose basketball highlights
FRI.| 4-12-24 | ENTERTAINMENT
Kulas and Barrow lead the team to states
Mon.| 12-11-23 | SPORTS
For the first time since the 80’s, the Rose women's cross country team has made it to states. Senior Saline Kulas and Freshman Ella Barrow helped their team achieve their goal of making the top five in regionals to make it to states together.
Kulas started running when she was in eighth grade and has continued since then because she has found it to be enjoyable. When she had some big injuries that resulted in quitting gymnastics, Kulas thought Cross country would be a fun sport to take on. She has now dedicated a lot of her time in the past four years to running.
“I recently had to stop gymnastics the summer before eighth grade started because I was getting injured too much,” Kulas said. “I needed to find something that is a little bit less pounding.”
Barrow also started running when she was in middle school. She and her dad decided it would be a good way to help her improve on soccer. To keep up her speed and talent, Barrow worked hard to train and run as much as possible.
“You have to keep up with [running] so that way you don’t drop off really easily,” Barrow said
Several members of the team put in extra effort to produce the results they wanted to see and they ended up making it to states. During the summer, Barrow would run to keep up her time and endurance. Sometimes there would be get-togethers with the team on weekends to run as well.
Contributed Photo
Senior Kulas pushes to the finish line during
her race. She envisions qualifying for states
for the first time since the 80’s.
“We train not only outside of practices, but we have some unofficial weekend practices,” Kulas said.
Although collaborative goals are important for a team to have, individual goals proved to make Kulas and Barrow better runners. One of Barrow's main goals was to improve her speed. This season she did not reach her goal like she had planned to, but she is going to be working hard this summer to improve for next season.
“I did not get to the nineteens like I wanted to,” Barrow said. “You can place individually as well as a team, so my goal is to place and go to states every four years.”
Along the way, there have been some difficulties with training to get to states while also keeping up with academics and all extracurricular activities.
“Sometimes it can get really stressful, not just the sport but keeping up with school it can all just start to pile up,” Barrow said.
Reaching the team's goal this year, Kulas and Barrow were excited to get to go to states as a team and run together. They have been working hard all year to reach this goal. It is all starting to get surreal for Kulas as she wrapped up her senior year on the team.
“It's exciting because I went to states individually as a sophomore, but I haven't really had a team to run with before this year,” Kulas said. “We get to go run the course together and do a lot of team stuff which we haven't really been able to do in the past.”