This is always a fun one with the various "extras" involved with this race, so I hope we enjoyed that.  I know we all wanted to win, but there were still a lot of positives.  Last year's team went into SPAM having lost all 5 meetings versus Collegiate during the season.  They ran motivated and ran the only possible scoring combination for us to win last year (by 1 point).  That seemed to be on Collegiate's mind yesterday as they ran more focused than I have ever seen at this race, trying to avoid us sneaking up on them again.  Although we beat them earlier in the season on two occasions, they crushed us last week and we hadn't run a full squad since Roslyn on October 7th.  Although we did not run a full 9 yesterday, we did have 8 finishers, which was our highest number since that Roslyn meet almost a month ago.  Looking back on the results now, you could argue that a fully healthy team or a few seconds here and there would have brought us to a tie or even a win, but that is all hypothetical.  Given the recent few weeks we have had, a race within 4 points was a pretty good result.

 

Tate continued his role leading the veteran improvement as he dropped 1:22 from last year's SPAM time.  LB was 7 seconds faster and Lawson was 2 seconds faster.  It was also about 25 degrees warmer this year than last year, which certainly cut into the improvement numbers.  Henry was our closest predicted time at 24 seconds off.  And, congratulations to Paul for winning the coolest wall clearance award, as voted by Human SPAM (Coach Alley of St. Catherine's).  Although we could not make it a "lucky" 13th straight team win, we were close and the runner-up trophy is still pretty cool with flames and a pig on it (to go with all the other SPAM items).  In the 22-year history, we are 17-5, so it is still a pretty one-sided rivalry, despite close races the last few years.  Henry also kept the individual win streak going as Collegiate has only won the individual title on 3 occasions (2014, 2013, and 2011 - we do not have detailed results pre-2009, so it is possible Collegiate won individually somewhere in those first few years).