From heartbreak to history: Kapaun sweeps Class 5A state cross-country titles
Out at Rim Rock Farm, the site of so many past heartbreaks, the Kapaun Mt. Carmel boys cross-country team found themselves once again in the loneliest place of all — thinking they had come up short once again.
After the race of their lives, after months of 5 a.m. long runs and four years of disappointment at this very course, the Crusaders had gathered for a cooldown jog, gutted by what they believed was another near miss.
The scoreboard near the finish line had flashed that Blue Valley Southwest had edged them by two points for the Class 5A state championship. Too heartbroken to speak, the boys jogged off together in silence, the sting of another Rim Rock disappointment heavy in the brisk November air.
Finally, senior Daniel Enriquez, their leader and the individual champion from the race, spoke up.
“We did everything that we could,” Enriquez offered up. “Every man on the team today fought for it with everything that they had. We put our best effort forth, so what more could we ask for? If it wasn’t our day, then it wasn’t our day.”
But while the seven Crusaders jogged away from the chaos, something remarkable was happening near the finish line. The race officials were recalculating the results — removing the individual qualifiers who had been mistakenly included in the team tally.
When the official results were posted, the scoreboard flashed a new update: Kapaun and BV Southwest had actually tied at 42 points each. The tiebreaker came down to the sixth runner, as Kapaun sophomore Kolbe Meyer finished 12 places ahead of his BV Southwest counterpart.
The title, 44 years in the making, belonged to the Crusaders.
“Talk about going from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs,” Garcia said. “It’s hard to properly describe the range of emotions there were.”
When the team returned from their jog, eyes still red from heartbreak, Garcia broke the news. Tears returned, only this time from joy.
The quiet hero for Kapaun cross country
In the moment, Meyer had no clue his all-out finish would determine the championship.
At the end of the race, Meyer was left exhausted and lightheaded. He had just out-kicked BV Southwest’s fifth runner in the final stretch — a pass that changed everything. Even though Meyer’s finish didn’t calculate into Kapaun’s top-five score, it pushed BV Southwest’s final scoring runner down to force the tie and, ultimately, the tiebreaker that made him the hero.
“I didn’t really think too much about why I needed to, I just did it,” Meyer said. “You can’t really think too much at that point in the race.”
Meyer, a sophomore, is known among the team as quiet and steady, a listener more than a talker, especially on a team led by three strong senior runners.
Whether he realized it or not, the words he’d heard all season from those veterans — about sacrifice and suffering — seemed to carry him through that final stretch.
“A big part of our whole team culture is our faith,” Meyer said. “We believe that when you suffer, you can offer it to God and he can do good things from it. So it’s actually really cool to be able to suffer for someone else.”
When it was revealed that Meyer had been the tiebreaker, his teammates mobbed him in celebration.
“Kolbe left his heart out there on the course,” Enriquez said. “We were so proud of him.”
Kapaun’s cross-country championship four decades in the making
Five years after his older brother, Erik, won the 5A title during his senior year, Daniel Enriquez followed in his footsteps to capture the individual gold in a winning time of 15 minutes, 12.42 seconds on Saturday.
But after crossing the finish line, instead of celebrating the moment, Enriquez was already turned around to watch the team race unfold. He was nervous, he admitted, when he turned around and saw three straight BV Southwest runners cross in the top-five.
In the end, the rest of Kapaun’s line-up came through. The Crusaders were packed tightly with senior Will Etheredge (sixth, 15:58), senior Cole Reintjes (10th, 16:15), sophomore Jack Sauer (11th, 16:16) and junior Koelton Erwin (19th, 16:26) all in the medals. Freshman Nathan Milligan rounded out the group.
“To finally win individually felt great, but honestly what mattered way more to me was the team,” Enriquez said. “To be part of the team that made history for Kapaun means so much to me. We’ve been dreaming big and wanting to be the best for a long time now and to finally do it, man, it truly was a dream come true.”
It was the kind of team Garcia had been building toward for years, forged in early mornings, long miles and unwavering faith.
“This team has put in an immense amount of work and I know the work they were prescribed because I wrote it,” Garcia said. “That’s why I would have just hated to see that not pan out for them. So for me, this was more of a relief than anything.”
A Kapaun cross-country sweep for the ages
The boys’ title set the tone for the Kapaun girls, who followed with a dramatic victory of their own — the program’s first in 22 years.
The Crusaders were considered the underdog entering the race to their crosstown rival, Bishop Carroll, who had beat them the previous two weeks for City League and regional championships.
The girls were already motivated to pull off something special. Seeing the boys win a title made the girls want to match the effort.
“Everyone instantly lit up after we heard the boys won,” senior Taylor Barringer said. “Me and my teammates were so fired up and so pumped. Everybody stepped up to the challenge after that. We wanted it.”
Led by sophomore Ava Claassen (second, 17:36), Barringer (fifth, 19:06), freshman Maddyx Erwin (ninth, 19:13) and junior Abigail Bird (13th, 19:21), the Kapaun girls scored 58 points to Carroll’s 79— sealing the school’s first-ever sweep of 5A team titles. Other team members included junior Caitlyn Bruening (20:33), freshman Lilly Marietta (20:48) and freshman Mary Larson (20:56).
It was the best performance of the season in the biggest meet of the season, as coach Gretchen Bina said several of the girls produced season-best times and if not that, then their best time on the challenging Rim Rock course. Perhaps the most important one came from Bird, who came through with her best race to give Kapaun a fourth top-15 finish.
It was the first time a school had swept the team titles at 5A state since 2018 when St. Thomas Aquinas won both.
“It really was just a whole team effort,” Bina said. “I had such an enjoyable time watching them put themselves out there for one another. They’re a special group of girls. They ran the last mile of that race with a lot of guts. They’re just tough, tough, tough.”
This story was originally published November 2, 2025 at 6:02 AM.
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