MTB Team Races Raccoon Mountain to finish 2024 season, Weiss claims overall podium spot

Steve Smail & Amy Dortch, MTB Team Coaches
The 5th and final race of the mountain bike team’s 2024 season was held at Laurel Point just outside of Chattanooga on the sandy, tech-y and rocky Racoon Mountain trails. For several weeks prior to the final race of the NICA league season, the team had been practicing on progressively more challenging local trails and terrain to prepare for this final race and to add to our season points in both the overall individual and team contests.
18 middle and high school cyclists competed in Race #5, which is also the NICA State Championship Race.

Senior Quinn Dehner closed out his 8-year mountain biking career in style (4 years with Harding Academy and 4 with USN), riding a clean and consistent 3 laps and finishing 56th out of nearly 80 JV Boys this year. Sophomore Avery Savona unfortunately suffered a knee injury 2 days before the race, leaving Charlie Blau and Caden Carrabba racing for the Sophomore Boys. Blau was super fast for his first half lap, then destroyed his rear wheel's rim on a rock, leaving him with a flat tire and running the remainder of the lap to at least cross the timing line once and secure his points for the day. Carrabba dealt with a time zone “snafu” prior to his start, but ended up having his best race to date, riding cleanly through this treacherous course without any preview or pre-ride opportunity. Blau, Savona and Carrabba finished in 33rd, 50th and 57th overall for the season out of 70 sophomores despite Savona and Carrabba only able to race 3 out of 5 races this year.
 
Freshman Maggie Weiss led the charge of the girls wave, and despite still in recovery mode from respiratory illness, fought hard to secure a 6th place finish for this race, placing her in 4th place overall and a celebratory podium spot at the trophy presentations. Weiss is only the 7th USN rider in 12 years to secure an end-of-season overall podium position for the HS team. Freshman Adeline Miller had a strong final race, finishing 7th and securing 8th overall for the season. Asha Guha felt strong on the first lap, but suffered through the 2nd lap, finishing 14th. The freshman boys trio of Aidan Harris, Seth Hauser and Basil Broemel pulled off 2 laps each, with Harris clocking in the team’s fastest first and second laps for the day, and Hauser only a few minutes back. Overall the boys landed in 33rd, 42nd, and 55th spots out of more than 80+ freshman boys. 
 
Our MS team had a chance to move into the overall top 10 teams and potentially the top 3 school-based teams (many NICA teams are “composite” teams, comprised of cyclists from many different schools), and they threw it all out there in the attempt to move up. Elsa Absi, Brianna Castro and Sylvie Mackler all completed 2 laps, but on their 2nd laps Castro suffered multiple crashes and Mackler’s chain became permanently stuck in 2 spots, slowing them down considerably. Absi was able to power through 2 strong laps, snagging 6th place for the race and 7th overall for the season, with Castro and Mackler finishing 12th and 14th overall. 8th graders Allen Chen and Charlie McNulty raced cleanly through 2 laps finishing 25th and 38th, landing them in 22nd and 29th spots overall for the season. 7th graders Mac Perry and Rosie Hauser, along with Barry Chen and Vincent Van Zandt all completed 2 tough laps in large and competitive fields. Perry finished 9th and Hauser 16th, placing them overall in 11th and 16th out of 25 7th grade girls. Chen and Van Zandt landed in 31st and 60th overall after finishing 25th and 38th in this race out of 73 7th grade boys.
 
587 racers across 30 teams competed this year in the NICA series, and overall team point totals are often really close for the last races. The HS team finished 19th in Race 5, also placing them 19th overall, but ranked 9th out of the school-based teams. This is a solid result for our HS team that missed several teammates due to conflicts and injuries later in our season (Leo Frein, Rohan Ramachandran, Tate Green, Avery Savona, Hannah Mackler, Suzie Zhao and Emerson Unertl-Coffman). For the MS, their Race #5 performances inched them into 10th place overall as a team for the season and in an amazing 3rd for school-based teams, a testament to their late season training, and of course a preview into future years of our strong coed MS and HS team.

Full results for Race 5 and the season are here: https://my.raceresult.com/315370/results#0_E025ED

See you in 2025!
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