Paschal will have both of its cross country teams on the starting line Saturday at the UIL state championships in Round Rock, and most of the Panthers making the trip are underclassmen.
Paschal's boys and girls each placed second at the Class 5A Region I championships in Lubbock late last month, according to results published by HubCityPreps.com, claiming two of the four team berths the region sends to state. Neither Paschal team was in the 5A state field last fall, UIL's 2025 results show.
The boys
Mansfield Legacy won the boys' regional title with 105 points. Paschal scored 150 to stay ahead of Frenship (158) and Burleson Centennial (168) for second, while Argyle and Denton tied at 193, just outside the qualifying places.
Senior Nolan Werth led the Panthers in fourth place in 16:00.6, finishing behind El Paso High's Andrew Truax, Lubbock High's Arturo Rodriguez and Legacy's Gabrial Martinez-Sanchez. Werth has been near the front all season.
He won the varsity race at the Cowtown 2 Mile Challenge in August with a personal-best 9:47, and he took third at the Byron Nelson Invitational in late September in 15:42, his fastest 5K, according to Paschal athletics. In that Byron Nelson race, the Paschal boys placed fifth overall and finished ahead of every other 5A team.
The rest of the boys' state roster is young. UIL's qualifier list includes junior Asher Werner, sophomores Mateson Gutierrez and Alex Wills, and freshmen Gavin Garcia, Hudson Pavell and Owen Tulbert.
The girls
The girls' regional race was tighter at the top. Prosper Richland won with 153 points, six ahead of Paschal's 159, and Argyle (168) and Burleson Centennial (175) took the last two state spots. Memorial was fifth with 194.
Two freshmen paced the Panthers. Stella Simpson finished 18th in 19:48.6 and Vivian Gonzalez was 20th in 19:52.4, according to HubCityPreps. The pair have led the team since August, when they placed sixth and seventh at the Cowtown 2 Mile, and both finished in the top 30 of a field of more than 200 runners at the Byron Nelson Invitational, the school said.
The girls ran in that meet's elite division and placed second among 5A teams.
Senior Isabelle Kerran is the only 12th-grader on the girls' state roster. She cut more than 90 seconds off her previous best at Byron Nelson, according to the school. The others listed by UIL are junior Molly Piper and sophomores Annie Groat, Erin McCain and Seeleigh Schwarz.
