By John Molene

Gavin Stauffer finished third and Nicholas McDonald was ninth to lead the Park boys in the Dewey Minnaert Invitational cross country meet at Hastings Thursday.

Park’s boys finished fourth in the 12-team meet, scoring 116 points.

Stauffer ran a 17:20.59 time in the race to finish third. McDonald was close behind with a time of 17:54.00, finishing ninth.

“Gavin Stauffer continues to run well,” said Park coach Brad Narveson. “He should be very proud of how he’s practicing and competing right now. Nick McDonald improved significantly from the first meet to the second and finished ninth. Our third through 11th runners were all within a minute and 20 seconds of each other. That’s great to see and that helped us finish fourth out of 12 teams in this meet. But to keep getting better as a team we’ll need those nine runners to start closing the gap between them and Gavin and Nick. If they can do that it could be a really fun season.”

Park’s Bronson Stachowiak was 32nd in 19:05.63. Tyler Krogman was 34th in 19:10.07. Mason Allen 39th in 19:17.10, Eli Firchau 40th in 19:19.22 and Henry Schluetter 52nd in 19:36.63.

“The team as a whole was impressive on Thursday,” said Narveson. “We had 23 runners race. 17 improved from the first meet to this one. Two runners ran their first race of the year. Out of our 23 runners I’d say that’s a pretty good sign that they’re getting better. And the weather was similar from the first meet to the second and the course this time was a little tougher.”

Osseo won the team race with 50 points, followed by Eagan, 88; East Ridge, 111; Park, 116; Mahtomedi, 140; Burnsville, 169; St. Thomas Academy, 176; St. Croix Prep Academy, 196; Tartan, 235; Hastings, 245; Woodbury, 279 and Cretin-Derham Hall, 318.

Senior Lydia Best of Park finished 27th in the girls varsity race, finishing in 25:41.14.