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2013 Rockin' Rookies...

Monday, 05 August 2013 01:10

The 1st-Season-athlete picture did not start to come into focus until June 30. On that day, a heretofore unknown 24-year-old White Bear Lake athlete stunned the field at Lake Waconia with her 2nd place finish. That really got the MMA Selectors attention. After she told us that she was a rookie, we looked at her prior results and were impressed. Then she finished 3rd at HOLT, and followed that with a course-record-setting win at Waseca 1/3. She followed that effort with another win, this time at Lakefront Days last Saturday.

While it looked like Nicole would run away with the award, we became aware of three other athletes, two guys and a girl, that deserve our scrutiny. Larry Hosch of St.Joseph has been impressive. In fact, he just won the Graniteman Tri Series title. Then there's runner-turned-triathlete Casey Miller of Baxter, who has a win, a 2nd and a 4th on his inaugural tri resume.

Finally, there's soccer star Olivia Bagnall, who torched Heidi Keller-Miler's six-year-old CR at Chaska in her (Olivia's) very first tri effort. She followed that with a 4th behind established stars Heather Lendway, Claire Bootsma and Suzy Fox at Chisago Sprint. Bagnall needs one more impressive performance to be eligible for a ROY nomination. We're sure that will happen. In fact, we expect her to rock her hometown (Lakeville) race (Lake Marion) later this month.

So, at this point in time the MMA Selectors are aware of four worthy ROY candidates: Nicole Heininger, Olivia Bagnall, Casey Miller and Larry Hosch. We are also looking at the potential eligibility of Duluth's Tiffany Kari, who rocked Top 5 efforts at Timberman and Brewhouse, and White Bear Lake's Andrea Nisler. (Andrea's debut at Brewhouse Sprint yielded a 7th place overall women's finish.)

Looks like another great year for Rookies.

In a few days we'll post the current considerees for Minnesota Junior of the Year.

ED. Apologies to those who read this post before 9:10 AM on Monday, which is when we finally got around to editing the piece. Gosh, I think we set a record for typos and syntax errors. UPDATE - We now know that Tiffany Kari, formerly Tiffany Carlson, is a veteran triathlete, thus she is ineligible for consideration in the ROY category.