After a hard season, the cross-country team reached the finals. Venice High varsity boys came in second place after Palisades in the Western League Finals, and varsity girls came in third place. Junior varsity boys are the league champions and junior varsity girls finished in fourth place.

Venice qualified for City Finals which took place on Nov. 22, and the students that ran were senior captain senior Ivan Gomez, senior Adam Baran, senior Ryan Sadegui, senior Bryan Merida, junior Paul Luevano, junior Robert Alvarez, and sophomore Raymond Sadeghi. From the junior varsity girls, junior Jocelyn Morales, and junior Josephine Galdamez participated, as did junior varsity boys, senior Jay Ruelas, junior Carlos Parra, junior Alexis Godinez , junior Robert Sawai, junior Joseph Han, and junior Steve Ruelas. From frosh-soph boys sophomore Miles Wolfe and sophomore Alexander Ruelas participated.

Luevano came in first place in varsity division one in City Finals, so as an individual he qualified to represent Venice at state finals. Among junior varsity boys, Parra achieved seventh place. Luevano did not place at state finals on Nov. 29.

In city preliminaries, in which the varsity boys moved on to the next round, Luevano came in first place out of 11 schools that participated.

The captain, Ivan Gomez, was disappointed that Venice didn’t qualify among the top five teams in preliminaries.

“We didn’t perform the way we should have, we had a tough day,” said Gomez about preliminaries. “It was the first time this season racing on that course so we were rusty. We shouldn’t be so low in the ranking; we have talent to come out in the top five in the city. We have to remember who we are.”