What does “Running like a girl” mean to you? This stereotype, historically, depicting girls participating in sports as weaker and less determined than boys is thankfully being disrupted. Here at Sentinel, we have our very group of athletic pioneers who are single-handedly redefining what it means to “Run like a girl”. This fall, Sentinel’s very own senior girls cross country team did their part by recording a season for the record books.
This all started at the Vancouver Sea-to-Sky senior girls cross-country running zone championships. The Sentinel girls filled up the leaderboard by placing from first to fifth in the team competition. This resulted in an unprecedented perfect ten- calculated by adding up the placings of each team’s first four members in the team competition. To be clear, this was a perfect ten — the best score possible — and they ended up beating the second-place team by a remarkable 59 points! This propelled the Sentinel senior girls team towards a chance to retain the Provincial title — after capturing it previously in 2018.
At Provincials, Sentinel then went on to achieve what no other team has ever done: a recorded score of 14. Beating out the second-place team by 50 points, Sentinel placed six runners in the top-25 of the competition, which included 220 finishers. Those finishers included Emmajean Neal (18 minutes 20 seconds) and Sidney Clement (18:27) who led the way for the Spartans by finishing fourth and fifth overall. As the Sentinel runners kept rolling in, sporting their signature bright-pink shorts, many spectators began to wonder: was this the best team to ever win a Provincial title?
This team of female athletes embody a healthy cultural shift; proudly wearing their hot-pink shorts, the Sentinel senior girls cross country team showed everyone present that "Running like a girl" means running strong, running with power, and running with style.
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