Thank you again to the parents for coming out to support everyone, especially those who helped on the course and those who helped clean up the various cones, posts, and flags after the meet.

 

As I mentioned in my brief last evening, we had a very successful meet with almost 100% improvement from our race at Roslyn two weeks prior.  The warmer temperature and breeze worried me in regards to improvement, as did the 2-week gap between Roslyn meets (we normally have 3), but the boys delivered.  Seeing someone like Gray who was motivated to hang closer to Henry and LB or seeing the 3-way battle with Tate/Asher/Lawson to be the #5 man really shows how much the boys put into this mentally, as well as physically.  As coaches, this full effort, especially in meets, makes us very pleased and proud to be your coaches!

 

Tate led the time drops from two weeks ago, running 46 seconds faster yesterday.  He was also 1:10 ahead of his October Roslyn race from last year.  Lawson was close with a 43-second drop from two weeks ago.  He also dropped 19 seconds from a year ago.  Gray had a 36-second drop from two weeks ago, once again, like FUMA, finished just steps behind LB.  Asher, James, and Paul all dropped time in the "teens", ranging from 13 to 18 seconds.  James was also 18 seconds ahead of his October Roslyn time a year ago.  LB dropped 8 seconds and Henry equaled his time from two weeks ago.  With these overall improved times, their mile pace, our main metric of improvement when comparing various courses, was also faster.

 

In the scoring, we had a great battle with Veritas and St. Bridget.  We had the first #3 runner of any team cross the finish line and we had the first #4 runner of any team cross the line.  Through 4 runners, it was very tight with Veritas at 47, STC at 48, and St. Bridget at 51.  The #5 man made the difference as St. Bridget was 20 spots ahead of our #5 man and Veritas was 12 spots ahead, pushing us to 3rd.  St. Edward's almost snuck in on us as their #5 man was 13 slots ahead of ours, but our #3 and #4 man were much better than theirs, giving us a slim 2-point win over them.  Although Steward and Collegiate were absent from this meet, it was great to see us score 20 points fewer than the first Roslyn meet, get 5 points closer to St. Bridget (who beat us by 22 last time), and of course get much closer to Veritas.  We get to see many of these teams again at our remaining meets (St. Catherine's, States, and Collegiate), so we will see what we can do against them next time around.  We will continue to be motivated by improvement, but these close point battles are fun too!  Our season record has moved to doubling our wins versus our losses, now at 24-12 this season (incomplete teams (fewer than 5 runners) do not count in our win-loss record).