Perhaps more than at any other level, seniority in high school sports matters. It means an athlete is experienced, older, more mature and a leader.

That may ring true in many cases, but for the ADM girls cross country team, it’s been a crop of freshmen who have carried the load this season.

Take the Tigers most recent race, a 4K run last Monday at the Hillcrest Country Club. For the third time in three races, senior Jenny Wicks was the first to cross the finish for ADM, finishing 11th out of 52 runners. The next four runners for the Tigers, however, were all freshmen and were all within 20 seconds of Wicks’ time: Ashlie Hauf finished 13th, Sidney Engleman was 14th, Kylie Hauf 16th,and Jesse Howard 17th.

That strong showing from ADM’s freshmen-heavy girls varsity lineup produced a second-place finish at the seven-team Tiger Invitational last Monday.

“It’s kind of a nice starting point to see a large group of freshmen that you can make the assumption that you’re going to keep developing that over the high school years,” head coach David Zwank said. “Sometimes with the high school time frame that can be kind of hit and miss, but for right now we’re enjoying that part of it, that we can kind of look to the future and know that we’re going to have some opportunities to build.”

Zwank added that his freshmen girls didn’t come in to the season in the kind of running shape he was looking for, so hopes that the early success “lights a fire” under his girls to train better this upcoming offseason and take their running abilities to the next level.

The ADM girls and boys varsity cross country teams are back in action this Thursday at 5 p.m., when they’ll run in the Perry invitational at Perry High School.