The Emmaus' girls cross country team already has the winner of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference's Most Valuable Player award in junior Katie Bacher.

If the conference also gave out a Rookie of the Year award, that would likely go to an Emmaus runner as well.

Freshman Abigail Dalton continued a stellar freshman postseason last week by taking fourth place in the District 11 Class AAA Championship race in Bethlehem.

Dalton led the Hornets to a second-place finish as a team, as well as team qualification into the state meet. She also earned her second medal in two weeks after earning one at the EPC Championships.

"I feel really good," she said. "I spent a lot of time planning during the week."

Her plan was to "take it easy on the first mile" and save her energy for the hills. She finished in 19:21.4, which was 25 seconds faster than her fifth-place time from the EPC meet.

Dalton, who went undefeated as a middle school runner, has been getting use to the longer distances throughout the fall and seems to be peaking at the right time.

"She's been on Katie's heels, especially in the second half of the year," said Emmaus head coach Dan Wessner. "She's been our No. 2 runner all year, but she's really come up on Katie in the second half of the year.

"Katie's improved a bunch even from last year so it was tough to tell if Abby was going to step right up front or be at No. 2. They're almost 1A and 1B at this point."

Bacher is happy to have another one of the league and district's top runners on her team and is excited to see what the two can do together next season.

"It's awesome having really good runners on the team," she said. "I think it will benefit both of us. We push each other and it's only going to benefit the team as a whole."

Bacher was 11th at districts, which was short of her fifth-place finish last season. She finished 19th at last week's EPC meet after going undefeated during the regular season.

"These two races are not indicative of what she can do," said Wessner.

Bacher's MVP award was announced at the league meet. The conference's coaches voted on the award.

"That was a huge honor," said Bacher. "It was kind of a surprise. I really worked hard this summer and to see it be recognized by all the coaches in the conference is definitely very rewarding.

"I didn't know how I would stack up going into the season. My coach mentioned early on that I might have a shot to win all the meets. I just took one meet at a time and it worked out in my favor."

Wessner wasn't surprised by Bacher's success or the award.

"I don't think there was any question she was MVP of the dual meet season," said Wessner. "She was the best runner coming back for us. She was looked at as our leader. She expected to be out front. She was certainly the one we were going to be leaning on as our front-runner and our leader."

Emmaus edged Parkland for second place in the girls team standings, 103-110. Both teams waited hours after the race to find out the team standings as problems with the electronic scoring systems led District 11 officials to tally the Class AAA team scores by hand.

The Hornets got solid performances from their entire top seven on a cool, windy day with the stakes at their highest. Their finish allows the entire girls team to make the trip to Hershey this weekend for the PIAA team championships.

Rounding out Emmaus' top five were Jaclyn Reinbold (25th, 20:59), Katrina Durrawachter (20th, 21:17) and Kristen Bray (34th, 21:33). Teammates Cassidy Leight (39th, 21:46) and Sneha Shankar (53rd, 22:23) were also part of the silver-medal winning team.

In the boys race, Emmaus' Darren Labenberg led the Hornets with a 27th-place finish as the boys took eighth place out of 17 teams. The rest of Emmaus line up included Del Vierling (34th, 18:08), Ian Adams (35th, 18:10), Luke Pukanecz (54th, 18:40), Tyler Corpora (56th, 18:47), Todd Moxey (57th, 18:48) and Charlie Norelli (76th, 19:19).

Easton swept the Class AAA team titles as three-time champ Colin Abert (15:43) won the boys race and Liberty's Raisa Kochmaruk (19:11) finished first in the girls run.

In Class AA, Salisbury's Kyle Gonoude (16:32) won the boys race while Central Catholic took the team title. Central's Colleen Daday (19:17) won the girls race as Vikettes finished in the first three places. However, Northwestern's girls took the Class AA team title with its top five runners all placing between 11th and 19th.

Notre Dame (East Stroudsburg) swept the Class A team titles, while the girls race was won by Marian Catholic's Tina Capparell (19:57) and the boys race by Moravian Academy's Sam Li (17:42).