Twenty-seven teams, including 223 runners, thundered down the chute at the start of the Boys 3A Cross Country finals last Saturday at the Horse Park, in Lexington.

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Cougar sophomore Bret Crawford finished 18th overall to lead the Cougars to a 12th-place finish at the Kentucky State Cross Country Championship, in Lexington.

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Clay Priddy and Bradley Stone were running together at the finis, while Corbin Harris is obscured by other runners. The trio finished iright behind one another, with Stone finishing 111th, Harris 112th, and Priddy 113th.

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Junior Sheldon Jones had a great run on Saturday, finishing 32nd overall to help the Cougars to a 12th-place finish at State.

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The Cougar cross country team had another good showing at the Kentucky State Cross Country Championships, finishing 12th of 27 teams last Saturday at the Horse Park Course, in Lexington.

Once again, sophomore Bret Crawford led the way for the Cougars, logging a top-20 finish from among the 223 runners who started the race. Crawford finished 18th overall with a time of 16.55.46.

Something of a disappointment for the program was the fact that junior Chaley Trail, who had qualified for the girls’ race for the second straight year, was unable to run.

Trail has been fighting an illness for the past several weeks which doctors have so far been unable to diagnose. She had been taken to Nashville earlier in the week, and while doctors there could not tell her family what exactly was wrong, they did say she should not run Saturday.

Grayson County finished 12th with 331 points. Two Louisville schools, St. Xavier and Trinity, finished 1-2. St. X finished with 20 points, having their runners finish in order from second to sixth. They could not capture the top spot, though, as Muhlenberg County’s Chase Geary outran everyone to the finish with a time of 15:58.66.

Trinity finished with 87 points for second, while Daviess County took third with 145 points.

Junior Sheldon Jones was the second Cougar to cross the finish line, coming in 32nd with a time of 17:13.04. The next three Cougar runners, and all of those earning points, finished one after another in 111th, 112th and 113th.

With about 100 meters left before the finish, junior Clay Priddy and sophomores Bradley Stone and Corbin Harris were running right together. Stone and Harris both passed Priddy at the end, but all finished within 1.13 seconds of one another.

Stone was 111th in 18:20.03, Harris was 112th in 18:20.64, and Priddy was 113th in 18:21.16.

The Cougars had two other runners who did not score points. Junior Jacob Hart finished 215th with a time of 20:56.02. Senior Justin Gallagher started the race, but had to drop out before the finish when he developed trouble with his breathing.