Behind the Scenes
Opening Morning at Prairie
Our first race day with the cameras: six races, one gray August morning in Cedar Rapids and the first look at what this Pella team could become.
Cinematographers Aaron and Neal pulled out of Cedar Falls at 5:45 in the morning.
The drive to Prairie High School in Cedar Rapids takes a little over an hour. Leaving that early was the point. We wanted time to film the course before anyone was on it, and to be set up and waiting when the team stepped off the bus.
Saturday, August 29, was the Cedar Rapids Prairie Invitational, Pella’s 2026 season opener. It was also our first race day with the cameras.
Everything we had filmed until then, the sunrise long runs, the interviews and the evenings in the weight room, had been building toward days like this one.
A Plan for Six Races
By 7:30 a.m., the crew was walking the course and talking through the plan.
A cross country meet does not give you one race to film. It gives you six. Varsity girls went first at 8:40, followed by varsity boys, the freshman girls and boys in their 4K races, and then both junior varsity races. The last one finished around noon.
That meant choosing where to stand, race by race. The start, a turn on the far side of the course, the long finishing stretch on the track. You cannot be everywhere, so you try to guess where the story will be.
It also meant remembering that opening day is not the whole picture. Several of Pella’s regular varsity runners were not in these races. The freshmen ran their own 4K, and a few athletes sat this one out. We were filming the first chapter, not a preview of the last.
A Gray Morning
The weather did not cooperate, or it cooperated perfectly, depending on how you look at it.
The morning stayed gray and damp. Umbrellas came out along the fence. For runners, that is just another race day. For a camera, soft gray light and a little rain can make everything feel heavier and more honest.
Some of our favorite frames from the day came in the minutes after the finish line, when the effort is over and the athletes have not yet started talking.
The First Results
The girls opened the season the way the program has come to expect. Pella won the Orange Division varsity race with 31 points, led by junior Lizzy Vande Voort in 19:15.3. Senior Ruth Dunham was right behind her among Pella’s scorers.
The freshman girls may have been the story of the day. Maechen Cowman won the 4K race outright in 15:01.1, and Pella’s freshmen took the top two places in the combined field and the top five in the Orange Division.
On the boys’ side, freshman Jonah Dunham won the Orange Division in his first high school cross country race. The varsity boys finished second in their division with a tight pack: 35.7 seconds separated their first and fifth runners, and four of their five scorers are underclassmen.
The junior varsity girls won their division too. Across the morning, the girls took three Orange Division titles and the boys finished second in all three of theirs.
The full results are in the race recap on the Pella Cross Country site.
The First Chapter
By noon, the last race was over and the awards were underway.
Opening day answered a few questions. The girls are strong again. The freshmen are fast. The boys are young and close together.
It left the bigger questions open. Who will step forward as the weeks go by? How will this team handle the weight of four straight titles? What will late October look like?
We drove home with hours of footage and the feeling that the season had finally started.
Drive for Five: Chasing History is presented by Ulrich Ford and produced in partnership with Good Era Film and FilmNorth.