What an exciting final meet of the season.  You can't script that kind of "walk off in the bottom of the 9th inning" equivalent to a cross country meet.

 

Go back to Monday afternoon during study hall.  I walk into Mr. Cross' room to chat a bit before going over to practice and start throwing a few numbers on the board.  I tell him I think I figured out a way to beat Collegiate at SPAM tomorrow.  After working out some numbers on the board, I landed on one unlikely scenario and a second more likely scenario involving our 2, 3, and 4 runners.  The unlikely scenario involved STC going 1, 3, 5, 8, 10 vs Collegiate going 2, 4, 6, 7, 9.  This involved an insane race from whoever was going to be the #5 man for us since he would have to beat the Collegiate displacers (#6 and #7 runners) to keep our score low enough to win 27-28.  Along with that #5 man improvement, it also meant that LB or James had to beat Collegiate's #2 man and Hudson had to beat Collegiate's #5 man.  Both of those latter items seemed like possible scenarios, but I was worried about our #5 runner knowing how many Collegiate had packed in front of our #5 in the previous 5 meets we have raced them.  So, I thought, what if our 5 man just gets the 12, which is the highest possible score for a #5 runner in a dual meet.  This meant that both LB and James had to beat Collegiate's #2 man and Hudson had to beat Collegiate's #5 man.  This seemed more doable in my mind, so this is what I shared with the boys at practice on Monday.

 

One of the reasons I like to focus on personal improvement is because that can be controlled by each individual.  A team score can be more based on what you have or don't have versus what the other team has.  This being said, after losing to Collegiate in all 4 home meets as well as the Collegiate 5k last week, I really wanted us to try and pull off the upset.  Plus, after 11 straight years of winning SPAM, I wanted to see us make it 12 so we could keep the big SPAM trophy for another year.  I also wanted to see how the boys would respond to this added pressure.  I semi-joke all the time that SPAM is the most important race of the year, but that does have some truth as it is the only meet I care about the score.

 

It certainly was a cold and windy one, but we were glad the rain came early and stayed away during the race.  As the race began and everyone came around for the first loop, things were looking good for us with a 1-2-3 order.  I was excited by this since we could not lose if we went 1-2-3, but was also slightly worried that the boys went out too hard and may not be able to hold off the Collegiate pack behind their #1 runner.  We only needed a 3-4 finish from LB and James, but I would have gladly taken 2-3.  Luckily they did hold off Collegiate's #2 runner as needed in my pre-race scenario.  Since that one scenario involved an automatic 12th for our #5 man (Wickham repeated his state meet finish as our #5 man and actually did earn his 12th for the scoring), it was down to Hudson to be able to beat the #5 man from Collegiate to give us the win.  When Hudson came around to finish loop 2, he was right there with 2 Collegiate runners, so I was a bit nervous.  Thankfully, like LB and James, Hudson stayed strong and had his patented end-of-race surge to help seal his finish ahead of the Collegiate #5 runner.  In trying to time the finish, I lost track of how many Collegiate runners crossed the line before Hudson, so I was not sure if he was ahead of their #5 or behind him.  During the cool down, Coach Fleming from Collegiate and I each ran the score and came up with the same results, a 28-29 STC victory.  It was hard for me to keep that to myself until we announced it, but I felt so proud of the boys in that moment that I had to bend down to my knees and shake my head in disbelief.  After all those early season losses, getting close at St. Catherine's a few weeks ago, only to get beat handily again at the Collegiate 5k last week, seeing the boys persevere was just a great moment.  Hearing and seeing the determination specifically from LB, James, and Hudson yesterday, throughout the day today, and right before the meet, I had a hunch that that trio was more than ready to do their part to avoid ending the 11-year streak of STC victories at SPAM.  Moreover, I think this meet situation helped these three dig down and find something that they maybe didn't know they had in them.  Those are the moments I live for as a coach.  And although it may seem like I just wanted to keep that ridiculously large SPAM Championship trophy another year, I knew that if we did happen to win this year, it was going to be an amazing David vs Goliath win, an 18th-inning walk-off home run if you will, and that makes the next year of that trophy in my room that much sweeter.  Back in 2014, we squeaked out a 28-30 victory in SPAM to start this amazing 12-year run.  This was the closest boys SPAM race in meet history until the 1-point victory today.  Next year is already shaping up to be a tight one.  When you score only 7th graders from today, Collegiate wins 26-29.  We are just going to have to out-recruit and out-train them during this next year to push the streak to 13 next fall!

 

Along with the gutsy performances from our middle scoring trio, we can't forget to mention some other great performances.  Davis continued his fantastic season with another win, becoming the 3rd fastest runner in meet history.  He won by 1:06 which is the 2nd largest margin of victory on the boys side behind Philip Cross' 2009 win by 1:28.  Davis also had a time guess that was 1 second off, almost earning a perfect time guess.  He also improved on last year's time by 35 seconds.  Speaking of dropped time by our veterans, Teddy dropped 3:36 from last year's SPAM race and Ely dropped 5:20!  Ely also moved up 19 places from last year while Teddy moved up 13 places.  All the times were pretty impressive in my opinion, and most of the time guesses were solid.  Hudson was our 2nd best guesser behind Davis at 10 seconds off while Paul was the 3rd best at 16 seconds off.  There were 5 other runners ranging from 18 to 29 seconds off their prediction, so again, pretty solid guesses.

 

The results are attached with plenty of historical items below the results.  There were no lap splits, so just divide the time in half to get mile pace if you would like to know that.  Our final record on the season was 39-49 (30-22 if you don't count the state meet), but that 39th victory today was certainly the sweetest!