StC News

Saints Win 3rd Straight JV Prep League Title

Coach Carrier
Thanks to 5 in the top 9, the Saints took the win to cap off a record total in wins (66) in one season.
This past Friday was another dominating performance for the Saints runners on all levels, and our nine middle school runners certainly played a big part in that.  For the third straight year, St. Chris won the JV Prep League race with a team comprised solely of middle school runners.  What makes this even more impressive is that most other schools run with mainly high school runners.  After dominating wins in the JV Prep League race at FUMA two years ago, and again at Collegiate last year, it was a bit tighter this year.  Thanks to a strong pack behind the overall top 3 from other schools, putting our top 5 between 4th and 9th place, we won our third straight title by 10 points.
 
Gray Hackney was our top runner for the second time this year on a 5k course.  His time of 19:37 was good enough for 4th place overall and tied Grady White's top team time this season, set last week at Collegiate.  Grady and Alex were close behind, with both boys under 20:00.  Henry was about 20 seconds back, just over the 20:00 mark.  Colby once again rounded out our top 5 with his 9th place finish overall.  Colby made a great surge in the middle of the race as he came through the 2k in about 25th place, well behind Woodberry's 6th man, among other people.  When he hit the 4k, Colby was up in 9th/10th place battling with a Collegiate runner (who Colby eventually beat by 8 seconds).  That big surge gave us what we needed to secure the victory over Woodberry.  When all was said and done, we had all 9 runners in the top 36 (out of 67 runners).  More importantly, just about everyone dropped time from their best 5k.  Gray dropped 1:13 from FUMA, while Alex dropped 54 and Henry 52 from Collegiate last week.  Given that Collegiate is an easier course, in my opinion, it made all the time drops on Friday seem even more impressive.
 
To go along with our JV wins at the Prep League meet for three years running, the Varsity too has kept up that streak.  They won in dominating fashion on Friday, putting 11 in the top 18 and 5 in the top 9.  In fact, they had the top runner from each grade in the race with senior Neal Dhar winning, Knight Bowles the top junior in 10th place, Will Wise the top sophomore in 9th place, and Ford Clark the top freshman in 16th place.  We also had the top 8th and 7th grade finishers in the JV race.  When you break down the Varsity finishes by grade level, you can also see that St. Chris had the top 4 freshmen and 8 of the top 9 freshmen in the race.  That is a great sign for the team in the coming years as they graduate 8 seniors, 7 of which were in the top 17 this year.  It also makes it important that our middle school runners continue to run as they move onto high school, in order to keep our winning tradition alive and well.
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