American Heritage’s Fitzgerald, Aquinas’ Goodwin are Broward Cross Country Runners of the Year
The goal for both Ashley Fitzgerald and Martin Goodwin was simple: Be in peak condition by the time the cross country state championship meet rolls around. Wins during the regular season are nice, but the focus over those first three months is primarily on conditioning, maximizing technique and making sure production is trending upward and times are trending downward when they made it to Tallahassee in mid-November.
Mission accomplished.
Both set personal-best times in their respective race and finished the year as the top runners in Broward County. As such, Fitzgerald and Goodwin are the Miami Herald’s Broward County Cross Country Runners of the Year.
Fitzgerald, a sophomore, ended the year as the state runner-up in Class 3A, crossing the finish line of the 5 kilometer race in 18:13.2. That was more than 45 seconds faster than her performance at the state championship a year ago when she finished in ninth place.
And after getting so close this year, and with two more years of high school remaining, Fitzgerald has her eyes on a state championship moving forward.
“I’m really, really excited,” Fitzgerald said. “I really want to get gold and I think I can. It’s going to be very tough competition of course with [Dillard’s] Christiana Coleman, [King’s Academy’s] Avery Fronrath and all the other South Florida runners, but I believe all of us together and push each other and I think I’ll be able to pull it out in the end.”
Goodwin, a junior, also saved his best performance of the season for the end. He finished in fifth place at the 3A meet with a personal-best time of 15:57 — the only runner from Broward County to crack the 16-minute mark. He shaved nearly an entire minute off his time at the state championship from a year ago, when he finished 40th in Class 4A with a time of 16:43.99.
“It was good to be able to PR there,” Goodwin said, “because I just visualized it for so long. Just doing it at the big moment was really nice.”
His performance played a huge role in St. Thomas Aquinas finishing fourth as a team, the only boys team from Broward County to crack the top-five in its class at state.
“It really all came together,” Goodwin said. “We weren’t ranked that well coming into the race, but we got fourth place and I think everybody did better than anybody expected of the team.”
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