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Sports

Bears Eye Great Cross Country Season

Girls coming off 4-2 season in 2010

The East Brunswick High School girls cross country team has the talent and the depth for a good season. All that remains is to perform on race day.

"I think we'll be pretty good," noted Michael Talbot, who is entering his 12th season as the East Brunswick coach.

East Brunswick is coming off a 4-2 season. It placed fourth in the Greater Middlesex Conference championships.

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Heading the list of returnees from that team is Sarah Frost, just a sophomore. She was a top 10 runner in the GMC finals last season as a freshman.

East Brunswick will also be counting on Melody Fakhrzadeh, a sophomore. In her one year of running at East Brunswick, she has been able to drop her times from about 26 to 22 minutes.

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Samantha Young, a senior, is another runner that should be one of East Brunswick's scorers this season. She also runs in the 22-minute range.

In regular season matches, a team can enter all of the members on its squad. During tournaments, however, it has to designate the top seven girls. The team score is then determined by the finish of the top five runners.

Practices started on Aug.18. Talbot was greeted by 32 girls wanting to run for East Brunswick.

In addition to Young, the other seniors are Jessica Eker, Grace Huang, Erin Nfonoyim and Rachel Lee.

The juniors on the team are Avital Breverman, Kristen Berezniak, Jessica Bloom, Dana Cohen, Joy Cui, Jacqueline Gufford, Nicole Mizrahi, Ruth Sun, Nancy Wang, Sienna Fallon and Cindy Zheng.

In addition to Fakhrzadeh and Frost, the other sophomores are Marissa Kircher, Kelsey McDonald, Daniella Woods, Kayla Sampson, Allison Loeser and Stephanie Harkavy.

The freshmen on the team are Vivien Chen, Emma Fehrenbach, Samantha Fong, Yllza Marku, Bijial Shah, Hana Skwish, Lisa Cohen and Rebecca Sun.

"We have some new members that will be very good," Talbot said. "We should be able to put out a good fight to be at the top of the county."

East Brunswick will get its first chance to see what those youngsters can do when it opens the season with a meet against Old Bridge on Sept. 13.

"I think we'll be one of the better teams (in the GMC)," Talbot said. "We had some big losses, but some of the younger kids put in the time over the summer. I think we can fill in the gaps."

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