What a difference a year can make.
For the ACPHS women’s cross-country team, it’s the difference between being runner-up and being champions in the Yankee Small College Conference. The team is on its way to nationals in Virginia this Friday, November 11.
Many factors can contribute to the difference between making it to the No. 1 or No. 2 position in any given season. This year, there’s no doubt that one factor pushing ACPHS to the front of the pack is Briana Miranda, who is running with the team for the first time.
“I don’t know that right off the bat we expected her to dominate the way she has,” said Cross-Country Head Coach Samson Dikeman.
Miranda placed first at the conference championship meet, completing her 6K run in 26:16 – her personal best time. The second-place runner was about a full minute behind. ACPHS’ Kayleigh Simpson placed seventh, and each of the six women Panther runners came in at 15th or better.
That allowed ACPHS to clinch the conference title. It was a particularly sweet feeling to beat last year’s winners, Paul Smith’s College, Dikeman said, after ACPHS finished in the runner-up position to the school last year.
This is sophomore Miranda’s first year running with ACPHS, but the team was sure she would be an asset. They all helped recruit her, Dikeman said.
“We had high expectations of her,” he said.
Miranda has not been running competitively her whole life, though she has always been athletic. For most of her earlier sports career, she was a gymnast, competing in middle school and high school through her junior year, at a school on a military base in Germany, where her family lived. She ran cross country her senior year.
She decided to attend ACPHS because she wanted a pre-medical track that would lead to becoming a surgeon. She had family in New York State, and her twin sister had decided to attend the University at Albany, so being in the same city was appealing. She also liked ACPHS’ small size, as she was used to a tight community on the military base.
She joined the ACPHS women’s team as a first-year student in Fall 2021. But pain in her knee caused her to miss practices, and she was worried about keeping up with academics at the collegiate level, so she took herself off the team.
She did not regret the decision, she said. But this year, she was ready to run.
“I need sports as an outlet. Last year, I ended up going to the gym all the time,” she said. “This year, I was like, ‘I’m just going to try it. I’m going to do it again.’ And I really like it,” she said.
Being a pre-med student means Miranda has a challenging academic course load. And she’s a bit of a perfectionist, noting her frustration at having a B in one class this semester – an exception to all the As. So sometimes, the need to practice with the cross-country team can feel stressful, she conceded, taking her away from other work. But in the end, running helps her de-stress and refuel, she said.
“It’s almost like good stress,” she said, “because running helps me, too.”
Dikeman described her as the model student athlete.
“She’s someone who is a case study that both can be done,” Dikeman said.
In addition to the conference win, Miranda was USCAA runner of the week at least two other times this season. The Yankee Small College Conference is part of the United States Collegiate Athletic Association.