Coach: Christine Kjenner

Home field: Mountain Meadows Farm, 42122 S.E. 102nd St., North Bend.,

What’s new: After a historic 2015 season for Mount Si High School Cross Country, the program has grown again. This year’s group of runners remains mostly intact as graduating seniors did not make up a large portion of the program.

Head coach Christine Kjenner, who has been coaching at Mount Si for 32 years, said she has seen the program skyrocket in growth over the past few years.

“I’ve really seen the program grow over all these years. Going from 10 to 20 kids, to then 40, 50, and then last year we were at 70 and this year we are at 90. We are at three coaches and we are probably going to need four,” Kjenner said.

Kjenner said both teams have both new and returning runners that make the teams even stronger.

“Blake Woodford and Sebastian Bednik are two up and coming freshman that are really going to add to our boys,” she said. “The girls, we’ve got most of our returners back expect for Melissa Hruska who is running for WSU. We are expecting some sophomores, Emily Webb, Addie Kaess to add to that.”

Construction at Mount Si has also forced the runners to move their home meets to another site, Mountain Meadows in North Bend.

Mountain Meadows, Kjenner said, is the location used for cross country before the program met at the school. It used to be a location of corporate parties hosted for Microsoft and Amazon, but the owners have allowed the Mount Si runners use the location again.

Looking ahead: This year, both the boys and girls cross country teams will be trying to surpass last year’s placings.

“The girls were KingCo champs, district champs, tied for second at state and lost in the tiebreaker. So we are seeing what we can do to repeat that. It’s going to be tough,” Kjenner said. “We only get two berths to the state meet. So it’s going to be a very tight race because KingCo is so talented.”

Sophomore Joe Waskom, who earned the highest placement of the Mount Si boys at state, said everyone has been using the last year to put serious effort into personal improvement.

“We all have been working a lot harder than last year. We’ve been putting in more miles and we’ve been going pretty hard in workouts and I think we’ll do really well this year,” he said.

Grant Baker, returning to cross country after an injury, continued Waskom’s statement saying that because they didn’t lose many seniors, they are in a good position succeed.

“All our meets we should do really well, because a lot of other good teams lost their seniors and we didn’t lose any of our top three scorers,” Baker said.

Senior Hannah Waskom, last season’s second place finisher at state, said she wants to help make this season a good learning environment for all the new runners this year.

“We had a lot of great seniors when we were freshman, we really want to make it a fun experience for the younger kids,” she said.

Don’t miss: Mount Si will host the next cross country meet on Wednesday, Sept. 14.