Leo Young, Sadie Engelhardt named Gatorade State Cross Country Runners of the Year
Ventura County’s grip on California cross country remains elite.
Newbury Park High senior Leo Young and Ventura High sophomore Sadie Engelhardt have been named 2022 Gatorade State Cross Country Boys and Girls Runners of the Year, the sports drink company recently announced.
“It’s crazy,” Young said. “It really is exciting.”
Young’s selection maintains Newbury Park’s dominance of the award.
The Stanford commit is the fourth straight Newbury Park runner to win the award, joining his elder brother Nico (2019) and teammate Colin Sahlman (2020 and 2021).
Remarkably, the national champion Panthers had no less than three worthy candidates between Leo Young, his twin brother Lex Young, who won the CIF-Southern Section Division 2 and CIF-State Division 2 meets, and fellow senior Aaron Sahlman, who won the Nike Cross Nationals.
Engelhardt is the seventh local winner of the award in the past decade, joining Simi Valley’s Sarah Baxter (2009-12) and Malibu’s Claudia Lane (2016-17).
“I’m very excited about that,” Engelhardt said. “Obviously, there’s a lot of great competition in California.”
Both Young and Engelhardt are excellent students. Young has a 4.65 weighted GPA. Engelhardt's weighted GPA is 4.50.
Young won the 5K Asics Clovis Invitational in 14:25.9 and the Marmonte League finals in 14:50.9. He finished second to Lex Young at sectional (14:38.2) and state (14:38.4) finals and led NXN for much of the 5K before finishing 11th (14:58.2).
The 17-year-old responded to the disappointment in Portland by winning the USA Under-20 Cross Country Championships Jan. 21 in Richmond, Virginia, despite running the 8K distance for the first time and competing against a field of elite high school and collegiate opposition.
“It’s ridiculous how close it was,” Leo Young said. “We were talking about it at practice. They could have picked any of us and it would have been a fair pick.”
“It was kind of poetic how things went,” Young said last month.
The victory earned Young a berth on the American team for the World Athletics Cross Country Championship later this month in Bathurst, Australia. Young will have two days to acclimate “down under” before competing on Feb. 18.
Young isn’t as concerned with the time change as he is the long flight to the Southern Hemisphere. Australian Eastern Time is only five hours earlier than the Pacific Time Zone, although it’s on the other side of the international dateline.
“Regardless, the flight is going to make it very difficult,” Young said.
Engelhardt won the award despite a fall season in which she was rarely at full strength, due to a series of illnesses.
Yet the 16-year-old sophomore won her first eight races, including the three-mile Woodbridge Classic in 15:42.6, the three-mile Channel League finals in 16:36.7, the CIF-SS Division 2 finals in 17:12.8, the 5K CIF-State Division 2 meet in 16:57.9, and the Champs Sports Western regional in 17:43.0.
“It was a big toll on my mental capacity,” Engelhardt said. “Honestly, towards the end, when I started regaining my health and qualifying for Champs, that made me feel better about my season.”
She finished 10th (17:41.4) in the Champs Sports national championships.
Engelhardt opened her indoor track season by winning the mile in 4:47.55 at the Spokane High School Invitational on Jan. 15.
“It was a rust buster, hopefully,” Engelhardt said. “It felt so strange running my first race (of the season) on an indoor track. It feels a lot more fast pace. I couldn’t tell if I was running fast or not.”
Engelhardt will return to the city of her birth twice in the next five weeks to race at The Track at New Balance in Boston.
She will compete this weekend at the New Balance Grand Prix and next month at New Balance Indoor Nationals.
“I think I’m going to be 100% by then,” Engelhardt said. “I’ve been getting in a solid amount of high quality workouts.”
Engelhardt was 9 when her family moved from northeastern Massachusetts to Ventura in 2016. She has grandparents who still live in nearby New Hampshire.
“I have a lot of memories of Boston, especially in the snow,” Engelhardt said. “Snow days were pretty fun.”
Engelhardt, who set the national freshman class record of 4:37.40 in the indoor mile last year at New Balance Indoor Nationals in New York, would break the sophomore class record of 4:40.1 — set by Elle Shea of Waltham, Massachusetts, last year — if she matches her personal best in Boston.
Joe Curley is a staff writer for The Star. He can be reached at joe.curley@vcstar.com. For more coverage, follow @vcspreps on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Young, Engelhardt sweep Gatorade state cross country honors
