Malta Cross Country 2021

The Malta Cross Country team has a few new faces this season and a couple of familiar ones in 2021.

"This year is definitely different," Malta Head Coach Thea Solberg said. "It's new, there are a lot of changes."

The only familiar thing is that the team welcomes back juniors Kirsta Meisdalen and Izzie Hallenberg, who have been a part of the team since the 2019 season.

"They are good, solid girls that bring good experience to the team," Coach Solberg said.

The team welcomes junior Kira Beck, a runner that has run for the Glasgow Lady Scotties in previous years.

The team also welcomes a pair of freshmen to the team; Megan Morser and Malin Beck, brother of Kira.

Malin became the first Cross Country boys runner for Malta in the school's first season of allowing boys to compete in the sport.

Malta also welcomes assistant coach Lisa Young, who competed collegiately for Brigham-Young University.

The team kicked off practice on Friday, August 13, and unlike last year, the weather was tame.

"It wasn't 102 degrees," Coach Solberg said with a laugh. "Last year, we started our season with a temp of 102 this year, it wasn't quite that warm and that was great. It was only 72 degrees."

The team had morning practices for the first full week, until the start of school.

"That was just to take advantage of the weather, because we had such a hot summer that it felt better to run in the cool weather," Coach Solberg said.

During practices, Kira and Kirsta have been close in times.

"Their paces weren't that far apart," Coach Solberg said.

Last year Kira and Kirsta posted comparable times, so Coach Solberg believes that they may work off of one another.

According to Solberg, Malin has been holding back his pace in the practices, though he has posted the fastest pace of any Malta runner during a meet so far this season, a run of 25:40.77 in Wolf Point.

Kira nearly bested her brother's season's best in Poplar, posting a time of 25:38.

"Those three (Kira, Kirsta, and Malin) have been running really close together," Coach Solberg said.

Coach Solberg shared her thoughts on adding a boys runner to the team.

"It's good," she said. "It brings a new dimension and as the years go along, the program will grow, and those that don't fit in somewhere else can get into cross country if they feel led to."

She also said that in the past, there have been several boy managers that ran with the team to stay in shape for other sports, or simply to stay in shape, and that a boys program has been wanted for years.

"My own son came out as a manager and he was training for an Army scholarship," Coach Solberg said. "I have had boys running, it's just that they were running as managers and couldn't participate in the meets."

Four out of five runners have already qualified for the state meet from their times at the Wolf Point meet.

Last Saturday, September 4, at the Poplar Cross Country Invitational, the team was without Malin, but the team fared well. Kira Beck was twenty-first with a time of 25:38, Kirsta Meisdalen was twenty-second with a time of 25:57, Megan Morser was fifty-third with a time of 29:39, and Izzie Hallenberg was sixty-ninth with a time of 41:28.

The team will participate in the Havre Invitational on Saturday, September 11.