The U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association honored two Juneau-Douglas High School coaches last week.<\/p>\n
Merry Ellefson and Tristan Knutson-Lombardo were named the Alaska girls cross country coaches of the year by the organization. The designaton comes approximately three months after they guided the Crimson Bears girls team to a state championship.<\/p>\n
“I think the girls winning the state championship was sort of a feather in our cap — and the cap of every single one of our athletes,” Ellefson said. “That’s really important to us, that we get better as a team because we all work together to get better at the same thing. It really, really is a congratulations to the entire team of the work that they’ve done.”<\/p>\n
Alaska was the only state with dual girls cross country coaches of the year. Ellefson and Knutson-Lombardo together embrace a co-coach role for the boys and girls squads, which is modeled after the team itself.<\/p>\n
“We do everything together: we travel together, we work out together, our captains captain together and really make sure people feel as equal members of the team,” Knutson-Lombardo said.<\/p>\n
View the entire list of girls cross country coaches of the year online at http:\/\/www.ustfccca.org\/2019\/01\/featured\/2018-ustfccca-high-school-cross-country-coaches-of-the-year-state-by-state-winners<\/a>. <\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com. Follow Empire Sports on Twitter at @akempiresports.<\/b><\/p>\n A dynamic duo. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":42040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-42039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42039"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=42039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"