A year ago, the Pella girls cross country team was returning to the state meet after missing out on the festivities in the 2021 season. They traveled to Lakeside Golf Course this past October as slight favorites in a field with some of the greatest distance runners in Iowa High School History shoulder-to-shoulder at the start line. Their ultimate triumph was so special because it was the first — Coach Doug Cutler and staff have come oh-so-close several times to an elusive state title, and the 2022 team was the right group to finally get them over a long-awaited hurdle.
Now, it doesn’t feel like “if” — it seems like it was the start of a dynasty. The wire-to-wire #1 in 3A Pella girls have dominated every same-sized school this fall, and narrowly came close to upsetting some Class 4A title contenders along the way to what as seems to be an inevitable push to the top of the mountain. That’s not to take away the difficulty it requires to get to this point — what seems so remarkable about this bunch of Dutch is that they are faster, stronger, and frankly, better than they were a year ago. A mix of newcomers has also bumped some of the best seniors this program has ever seen out of the varsity mix and made Pella an overwhelming favorite to claim gold again in 2023.
Head Coach Doug Cutler: “There’s some great competition out there — Gilbert is an outstanding team, Mount Vernon-Lisbon, Solon, Ballard, Glenwood had a great state qualifying meet, so we know there’s a lot of really good teams out there. But we know who we are, we know what we can do, I would be a fool to not to agree that we are probably the heavy favorites at this point, I mean, we have seven girls who could all break 20 minutes potentially on that state course. That would be a phenomenal thing to happen; that doesn’t need to happen, we don’t need to try and do something extraordinary, necessarily. What I believe is that if we continue to run the way we’ve been running, continue to trust that we are getting better and faster and that we can maintain certain speeds at certain points in the race, I think something extraordinary could happen. But it doesn’t need to be done by doing something outside of who we are.”
There are still a few big questions to answer in this Class 3A meet, and there will be a few teams looming to make what would, by all accounts, be a historic upset.
While the team trophy seems to already have a shipping label set for Pella High School, the individual race may be a bit more challenging, but fascinating, with Paityn Noe no longer hovering over the rest of the field. Sophomore Marissa Ferebee dealt with multiple, nagging injuries over the first month of the season, but enters the state meet as the top ranked runner in 3A — a title she started the season with, and now, opportunity awaits the star to see if she can shine again at Fort Dodge and give a historic haul of hardware to the green and white.