tim miles
usatf minnesota hall of fame induction

If you aren’t aware already, Tim is being inducted into the USA Track & Field - Minnesota Hall of Fame this Sunday, January 19th at 5:30PM during USATF MN’s annual Award Celebration at the Eagan Community Center. You can register to attend by emailing office@minnesota.usatf.org. Tim is the 24th Coach in Minnesota history to be inducted. You can view the full list of inductees and current members here: Hall of Fame – USATF Minnesota Hall of Fame.

2024 CROSS COUNTRY BANQUET RECAP

GINGERBREAD HOUSE DECORATING CONTEST

We kicked off the banquet with a gingerbread house decorating contest and gave each team 10 minutes. We had two teams who were successfully able to have a house that was actually standing by the end of the 10 minutes, so they instantly became our top two. While Team Beans was able to put together an impressive recreation of the Palaestra, indoor track and outdoor track, we chose Los Comodores as the winners since they were the only team who actually made a traditional gingerbread house that could stand on it’s own. Team Beans earned runner-up honors, Team Watab came in 3rd with their “house” that slowly fell apart and Team Beginner’s Luck came in last since their gingerbread house didn’t end up looking too different from when they took it out of the box. More pictures below.

show & tell

Max McCoy took home the 1st place honors in this year’s show and tell with his bottle of Pedialyte that he says his doctor prescribed him after weeks of bowel movement issues… It’s all about presentation here, and Max really committed himself to the bit. Runner-up was A.J. Skinner with a t-shirt listing some of my most common “coaching phrases” that the team was apparently keeping track of. Rounding out the podium in 3rd place was Lars Molenkamp who brought a gift that a classmate gave him to try and make-up for not contributing at all during a group project in class this past fall. Joe Gathje, who finished in 4th place, can also be seen above showing & telling us about his go-to disc golf uniform.

ONE ACT PLAYS

Our winning one act play was from Team Beans, pictured above, who reenacted the team’s hike up to the top of the fire tower at Itasca State Park during our pre-season training camp trip this past season. During the hike, a few team members were a little too afraid of heights to make it all the way up to the top and, for one act play purposes now, came to be rescued by junior Aiden Chalmers (played by Aidan Thomas in the photos above), who serves on the St. John’s Fire Department and is known to be shirtless a little too often.

2nd place One Act Play - Beginner’s Luck with their reenactment of the St. John’s Athletic Training Room during cross country — I mean — football season.

3rd place One Act Play — Los Comodores — with their reenactment of Chuck Ceronsky’s Hall of Honor Interview this past fall

4th place One Act Play - Team Watab with their reenactment of Tim’s Hall of Honor interview this past fall

SENIOR GIFTS

FRESHMEN GIFTS

Freshmen class with their freshmen gift — funky SJU CC ties (none of them were able to tie their tie correctly for bonus St. Michael’s Games points for their team)

VARSITY LETTERWINNERS

MISCELLANEOUS BANQUET PHOTOS

Senior Nate Courchane teaching the freshmen how to tie a tie correctly, after none of them were able to within 30 seconds to win a bonus St. Michael’s Games point for their team

final st. michael’s games team scores

Extra Sensory Perception, which serves as the grand finale of both the banquet and each season’s St. Michael’s Games competition, involves one member of each team hiding behind a random door in the hallway outside the J Club Room. Then, the rest of each St. Michael’s Games team must guess which door their teammate is behind. If they guess correctly, their team wins a staggering TEN St. Michael’s Games points. Going into this last event, the team scores were very close with just two points separating first, second and third.

In the end, none of the four teams correctly guessed which door their teammate was behind so the team scores did not change, and were as follows:

Champions: Los Comodores (40 points)

Runners-up: Team Beans (39 points)

3rd place: Team Watab (38 points)

4th place: Beginner’s Luck (21 points)

A very exciting banquet this year as it was such a close team competition other than Team Beginner’s Luck, whose name did not hold any truth unfortunately.

Congratulations to Team Los Comodores! I’ve been told each team member called their parents immediately after the banquet to deliver the good news.

LOVER’S LANE VIDEO

@johnnietfxc on Instagram

One of our former team members, Carter Jostock, has been kind enough to do some video work for us this fall between his duties of making the recap and highlight-reel videos for the SJU Football team — and he does a fantastic job. Carter ran cross country with us last fall as a freshman before deciding his heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Carter put together this quick video above from the annual Lover’s Lane workout earlier this season as well as a recap video from our opening home meet, the Toni St. Pierre Invitational, in St. Cloud. I will link that video down below as well in case you haven’t seen it.

@johnnietfxc on Instagram

INDOOR ALUMNI MEET

Hope you can join us at this year’s alumni meet next Saturday, January 25th at 11:00am at the indoor track. The annual alumni social will be in the Founder’s Room in the Quad again after the meet. Time to find three classmates and a costume and send us an over-confident seed time for your 4x4 team!

I hope you had an enjoyable holiday season and a happy new year, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

-Maxwell