2A Girls Cross Country: The Vanguard’s Nadhia Campos Wins Third-Straight Title

COLORADO SPRINGS – Nadhia Campos has once again added her name to another page in the Colorado high school cross country history books.

The Vanguard’s vaunted harrier also set herself up potentially to do plenty more of that as a senior in 2024.

Winning her third-straight Class 2A individual title at the cross country state championships at Norris Penrose Event Center on Saturday, Campos broke her own classification record with a winning time of 18 minutes, 19.1 seconds. She had previously set the record last season at 18:37.1, making her new record time an incredible 18 seconds faster.

“I’m just really happy and it helps keep me motivated,” said Campos, who went unbeaten in Class 2A this season. “My work is paying off at this time and I’m just really happy I was able to break my record again. That was the goal coming in, just doing better than last year.”

With three titles under her belt and a year left in high school, Campos now also has the potential to join an elite group of four-time individual champions if she defends her crown once again as a senior in 2022.

“I definitely want to try to go four years winning state,” Campos said. “It would be really cool to do that.”

In the team competition, Heritage Christian won the team title with a score of 37 after finishing runner-up in the team competition the last two seasons.

“It was really great. Going into it, our coach just told us, ‘You guys can do it,’” said Heritage Christian sophomore Mikaela Kendall, who finished runner-up (19:22.6) individually. “We had this running joke that he would buy us HOKA slides if we won. Then he said he was going to buy them in advance because he had so much confidence in us to do it. That really helped us going in, I think. It was just really amazing.”

Heritage Christian’s score was ten points better than Lake County, which had a perfect team score at regionals and returned five of its six scorers from last year’s state meet. Champions in 2021 and 2022, the Lake County girls program is second all-time with a total of 11 team titles. Combined with the boys program (19), the school has an all-time most 30 cross country team championships.

Banning Lewis sophomore Alexia Gonzales, who placed fifth last season, finished third individually with a time of 19:44.4. Telluride sophomore Austin Cook (19:52.8) was fourth and Caprock Academy senior Taylor Skinner (20:09.3) was fifth.

Banning Lewis placed third in the team competition with a score of 69.