Photos by Jake McNeill: Marshall junior Sam Deutz runs the opening meters of the Section 2AA championship meet at Benson Park in North Mankato on Thursday afternoon. Deutz finished as the individual runner-up to help the Tigers earn a second-place finish to return to the state meet.

NORTH MANKATO — For the second year in a row, Marshall will be sending two teams to the state cross country meet. The Tiger girls and boys beat out the hail and thunderstorms to claim a pair of runner-up finishes at the Section 2AA meet at Benson Park on Thursday, capitalizing on one top-10 finisher on the girls side and four on the boys side.

Boys meet

Sam Deutz finished as the individual runner-up for the Marshall boys cross country team, paving the way for the Tigers to finish as the 2AA runners-up for the second year in a row.

While the place was the same in 2023 and 2024, this year’s meet went down as much more of a toss-up. Mankato East won the 2023 section title with 28 points, beating out Marshall’s 61 and Belle Plaine’s 66. This year, East won with 35 points while Marshall was right on the Cougars’ tails with 37 points. Still, Marshall didn’t have to sweat out whether or not it would qualify for the state meet as it finished well ahead of third-place Belle Plaine’s 91 points.

Deutz, the Tigers’ top finisher, crossed the finish line at 15:54.6, sandwiched between Mankato East’s Audi Thom at 15:44.9 and Dayton Clobes at 16:02.6. The performance marked a drastic improvement from Deutz’s time at last year’s meet, in which he placed fourth at 16:23.

“Just my training all summer,” Deutz said when asked what allowed him to put together his performance. “I feel like I’ve done really well and my teammates and coaches have helped me out a lot.”

Still, Deutz was far from the only Marshall individual with a spectacular performance on the day. Landon Marthaler also was near the top of the result sheet in fourth place, crossing the line at 16:20.5. Keagan Anderson and Kohen Holcomb also placed seventh and eighth at 16:20.5 and 16:23.5 respectively.

Still, the Tigers’ four finishers in the top 10 weren’t enough to gain any breathing room. Shortly after Marshall’s third and fourth runners finished their race, Mankato East’s did as well to keep things tight. Joseph Foley and Andrew Stoltman took ninth and 10th place in quick succession at 16:27.2 and 16:27.3.

As a result, it all came down to the teams’ No. 5 runners. In the end, East edged out the Tigers with Colin Talle taking 12th place at 16:34.9 and Marshall’s Ethan Bly placing 16th at 16:47.0.

Jack Gunn and Josh Leibfried also put together solid times for Marshall, albeit not scoring, with Gunn finishing at 17:23.0 and Leibfried at 17:23.7.

Marshall will now prepare for its return to the state meet. The Tigers placed third at the Class AA championship last year and returned all of their five scorers from that team.

“I think we’ve just got to stay positive. The goal is obviously to place as high as we can, and I think we can do that,” Deutz said. “Just worry about ourselves, running our own race and trust the training.”

The Class AA championships will be held at the University of Minnesota’s Les Bolstad Golf Course in St. Paul on Saturday, Nov. 2. The boys race is scheduled to start at 10:45 a.m. with awards slated for 11:15.

Girls race

After last season’s state championship run, the Marshall girls cross country team lost a handful of seniors and a pair of other runners who opted out of returning to the team. Despite some young fresh faces, the Tigers proved to be ready for the challenge as they finished as the section runners-up to return to the state meet.

“It was fun because we’re all really young on this team and a lot of us don’t know what it’s like [to qualify for state],” Marshall’s Katelyn Leibfried said. “We’re all telling them that it’s fun to fight for each other and it’ll all be okay.”

Head coach Marie Sample noted that the Tigers had lost some of the leadership from last year’s senior class but the younger girls still stepped up to fill in that role.

“We took what we had and we built a team with it,” Sample said. “Oakley [Schneekloth], Landrey [Graven] and Katelyn [Leibfried], all year long said, ‘You guys, get up here on our training runs.’ because pack running is so important. It was a total team from the beginning to the end.”

“Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I just kept thinking, please don’t let it end tomorrow. Please, these guys have come so far. Please let them come out,” Sample said. “We knew it was going to be a four-team dogfight and it was.”

As a team, Marshall finished with 78 points to beat out third-place Mankato East and fourth-place Mankato West’s scores of 83 and 85 for the final state tournament slot. St. Peter won the meet with a team total of 53 points.

Sophomore Katelyn Leibfried, one of three sophomores on the team otherwise made up entirely of freshmen and middle schoolers, was the Tigers’ top runner on the day. She earned a fifth-place medal last year and proved instrumental to Marshall’s advance again with a sixth-place finish at 19:17.7.

While Leibfried was the Tigers’ only top-10 finisher in the meet, Marshall dominated the teens. Freshman Landrey Graven placed 12th at 20:09.1 while seventh grader Jasmine Murphy placed 14th at 20:17.0. Freshman Oakley Schneekloth also placed 17th at 20:25.3.

Schneekloth and Graven also contributed to last year’s section title with Schneekloth placing sixth overall at 19:26.7 and Graven placing 16th at 20:18.1.

Marshall, Mankato East and Mankato West were locked in a dogfight for the final spot at the state meet, leaving it down to the teams’ final runners to determine whose season would advance. Sophomore Katelyn Soupir, in her first year of cross country, found herself trailing three East runners heading into the final stretch. Yet, she picked up the pace and hawked down a pair of Cougars to help Marshall clinch the final spot, setting a personal-best time of 20:54.8 to claim 29th place.

“[Soupir] said to me, ‘I was standing with my friends in the hallway and I watched your team walk down the hall [in the pre-state meet walkthrough]… and I thought I’d really like to do that, but I don’t know if I’d be able to do that,'” Sample said, adding that she met her in track season running the 200 meters but Soupir felt like she wasn’t getting faster in the sprints. From there, Sample got to recruiting for cross country. “She came [to summer running] and she just kept plugging away. That whole group of girls, really, there was so much growth from the beginning of the season to now. So many new kids, only three left over from the state championship team, and I couldn’t be more proud of them.”

With about 100 meters left in the race, Sample said that Soupir was holding her side and Murphy was getting sick. Still, the two pushed through the pain to keep their team’s season alive.

Fairmont’s Macy Hanson won the meet for the first time after finishing in the top five each of the last three years, clocking in at 17:52.2. St. Peter’s Keira Friedrich and Lucia Penner took second and third at 18:27.2 and 19:06.7.

The Class AA championships will be held at the University of Minnesota’s Les Bolstad Golf Course in St. Paul on Saturday, Nov. 2. The girls race is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. with awards slated for 11:15.

“We’re just going to keep talking about team and family,” Sample said. “We get to practice together for another seven, eight days and they’re like, ‘Let’s do this.’ You get to take another trip together, we’re going to run one more big race together and it’s all about together. Being a team together. That’s ultimately where they get their success from, it’s from running for each other.”