With no competitors in view, Mount St. Joseph senior Tori Perri is about to win the 2009 AACA Cross Country Championship meet.

Last Tuesday at the 2009 Athletic Association of Catholic Academies Cross Country Championships, Mount St. Joseph Academy senior Tori Perri was able to have her AACA career end the same way it had begun.

Perri won the league meet at Tyler State Park as a freshman in 2006, but injuries held her back at the AACAs in each of the next two seasons. Back at Tyler last week, the Magic’s premier runner went out on top, winning the three-mile race in 18 minutes, 40 seconds. Perri completed the circuit 34 seconds faster than runner-up Emma Mahoney, a sophomore from Villa Joseph Marie.

The next two finishers were senior Liz Barrett and freshman Megan Magarity of St. Basil Academy, which would claim the team championship for the fourth year in a row. The Panthers scored 51 points to the Mount’s 57, while Villa Joseph Marie came in third with 78 points and Villa Maria was fourth with 96. The rest of the field consisted of Gwynedd Mercy (112 points), Nazareth (114), Sacred Heart (199) and Merion Mercy (224).

“I’m just so happy to have run in a league like this,” Perri said after the race. “To run with girls like Kelly McEldrew [Gwynedd], Kathleen Davies [St. Basil] and Liz Barrett has been great, because every year I know I’ll always have someone out there challenging me. We all have our ups and downs, and today I had an up.”

Perri was a team tri-captain this season along with Olivia Leporace and Alex Zanetti, but the athletes who emerged as the Magic’s fastest runners were mostly new to the team. After Perri and sophomore Danielle Leporace (Olivia’s sister), the other members of the top seven were freshmen.

At last week’s league championships, ninth-grader Meredith Reiche was the Magic’s second finisher, coming in eighth overall in 19:58. Her classmate Patricia Hoffman was 12th in 20:20, and Leporace was 16th in 20:45. Next came three more freshmen, Margaret Buckley (20th; 21:01), Adrienne Cellucci (36th; 22:32), and Hoffman’s twin sister, Kathryn (37th; 22:38).

In addition to being the runner-up team at the championships (up from fourth place in 2008), the Magic had also posted the second-best record in a very competitive dual-meet season. St. Basil went undefeated but only eclipsed the Mount by a single point, and the Magic in turn, won 27-28 over Villa Maria. Villa did not fare as well as expected at the championships, since its No. 1 runner, senior Paige O’Neill, missed the event due to illness.

MSJ’s Perri could sympathize with the Hurricanes’ leader. In the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, she suffered a stress fracture that curtailed her training, and finished seventh at the league meet that fall. Last year, Perri went out to Tyler Park for a practice run the week before the AACA’s. Hitting a patch of fallen walnuts (which can be thick on the ground in several sections of this course), she twisted her ankle and was unable to run at the championships.

This year, a stretch of unseasonably cold weather gave way to milder, sunny conditions just in time for Tuesday’s event. It was a good omen for Perri, who won the 2006 race in unusually warm weather.

“I can get through the cold ones,” she said, “but I love the warm weather; I always have since I was young.

“When I was doing my warm-up I just felt good,” she continued. “I got out strong and established a pace that I was comfortable with, and then I just kept pushing it.”

Midway through the race, she had already built up most of her eventual winning margin, and she didn’t let up the rest of the way.

Perri, who also runs distance events on the Mount track team, is still sorting out her college choices. She enjoyed a recent trip to Penn State, but that was only her first official visit.

Meanwhile, the PIAA meets in cross country still lie ahead, challenges which most of Perri’s youthful teammates will be facing for the first time.

“A lot of people have helped me at the Mount,” she observed, “so I try to help the younger girls out whenever I can. Mostly, I just try to get them to relax before a race and be confident in their own abilities.”