With the state qualifying meet now less than a month away on October 23, cross country teams are starting to get into the home stretch of their preparations of making it to Fort Dodge. For Pella High, they’ll have another “warm-up” race in Indianola this afternoon. In addition to some tougher meets, practices for the Little and Lady Dutch have also been getting increasingly more intense, says head coach, Doug Cutler.

Pella’s runners also have some extra motivation on the back end of their regular season.

“We have a team goal this year, right now, we’re trying to, since the Grinnell meet, set 300 personal records,” says Coach Cutler. “We set 49 of them at the Ballard Invitational. The team is going for 300, and the big prize at the end that the kids have come up with, is if we reach 300 at the end of conference, they get to shave my beard off. It has been five or six months I’ve been growing this thing, and it has kind of become a staple. I haven’t been clean shaven in almost a decade, and they are a little excited to try to make that happen.”

Cutler jokes that he wouldn’t mind at least trimming it, which he hasn’t done since early March, as it keeps getting caught in his zipper when he looks down. The Indianola meet gets going today at five.