The true sense of a cross country team being a team helped lead the Saints to a hard-fought win at FUMA.

Thank you to all the parents that drove out to support the boys.  Thank you especially to Mr. Irving for taking some photos with his fancy lense (you can check them out here).  After being "glazed" with mud from the soft spots on the course, the boys certainly earned their Krispy Kremes after the race.  A special thanks from the boys to the Irvings for bringing those today for our only "morning" meet of the season.  Along with Veritas, we were the only Richmond team out there, so it was great to have some fans from RVA.  I always enjoy the hour drive down Patterson on a Saturday morning in October.  It was decent weather, despite a bit of humidity early on, the dew on the course, and of course the muddy spots, particularly in the woods.  Along with the challenge of our first 5k of the season, it is a nice change of pace to see some different teams, and ones that seem to push us every year.

 

Along with handling the conditions and the longer distance, we had a goal of beating the mile pace the boys ran at Roslyn.  The Roslyn race is .85 miles shorter than FUMA, but with the hilly nature of both courses, they are somewhat similar in terms of terrain.  Plus, even though the race was longer, the boys have been working hard these past 2 1/2 weeks and I think it showed today.  Today is also the biggest day in terms of seeing who has been doing their weekend runs over the past month, and this will show itself more as we head into our longer races toward the end of the season.  I am pleased to say that 7/9 runners had a faster mile pace today than Roslyn (Teddy doesn't count in this figure due to not running the first Roslyn meet).  In fact, 5 of those runners were at least 15 seconds per mile faster, led by McCoy Eakin (39 seconds faster), Henry Peace (33 seconds faster), Burn Bradshaw (27 seconds faster), and Ely Irving (26 seconds faster).  In the case of McCoy, that means his overall time was over 2:00 faster than his goal today!

For our quartet of veterans, they actually got the chance to run this course twice last year as they ran in this same meet, albeit a week and a day earlier on Friday 9/29, and also in the JV Prep League meet on Friday 11/3 as it was FUMA's turn to host.  McCoy dropped an astonishing 5:11 from this time last year and almost 2:00 from the end of season race last year.  Henry Peace was 1:33 and 1:03 faster than last year's races, Charlie Branch was 1:30 and :16 faster than last year, and Avery Berents was :24 faster than last year's first race, and not far from eclipsing what he ran at the end of the season last year.  Charlie's 16-second drop moved him up from 10th to 8th on the STC all-time list at this course and 18th on the STC all-time 5k list.  Davis Mullen now ranks 5th all-time for STC 7th graders on this course, just 4 seconds behind Charlie's time from last year.  Not too shabby for guys who were not quite at 100% after dealing with sickness/injury/fatigue earlier this week.

 

Times aside, I was also excited to see other moments during the race.  Charlie was in a leading group of 4 early in the race and it was great to see him respond to all the early moves, even making one himself.  Davis ended up in no-man's-land early in the race, but worked the second mile well to catch and pass the 2nd runner from the team that finished in 2nd.  Our new trio of Burn/Avery/Henry went out a little conservatively and had work to do just a half mile into the race, but they kept pushing and picking off runners, especially runners from the 3rd place team today.  The rest of the squad hung tough as the race progressed with Teddy Sterrett as the only runner to run his 3rd mile faster than his 2nd, Ely Irving and Brennan Regan blasting down the final straightaway, and McCoy being more aggressive early and still hanging on.  His last split alone was about 3:00 faster than his 3rd mile split in this meet last year!  Guy Eubanks had to deal with an early cramp, but ran a consistent final two miles, just 9 seconds difference.

 

In the scoring, we were in our usual battle with Louisa and also the club team from Fredericksburg (Rappahannock Ospreys).  Fluvanna is occasionally in the mix as well, but not today.  It is slightly unfair that the Ospreys are basically an all-star team competing as a school, but it does make beating them all the more sweeter.  Louisa is always tough, and during the race it looked like we had just enough of a gap on their #4 and #5 with our #4 and #5 to beat them.  I was more worried about the Ospreys and with Fluvanna's white jerseys in there with the Ospreys white jerseys, it was tough to gauge how many had come in during the early part of the race.  Through the top 3 runners, it was Ospreys 13, STC 18, Louisa 22.  After the top 4, it was Ospreys 23, STC 32, and Louisa 41.  But, proving once again that you need more than just a few good runners to be a good team, the 5th man for the Ospreys was way back, giving us a chance.  After they put 4 in the top 10 and we only had 2 in at this point, I was a bit concerned.  So, thanks to our pack running of 3-4-5 runners (Burn/Avery/Henry) to round out the scoring for us, and to McCoy and Guy who beat the Ospreys 5th man, making his team score number go 2 points higher, we were able to pull out a 14-point victory over the Ospreys and a 16-point victory over Louisa with a score of 47 to 61 to 63.  Fluvanna was a distant 4th with 100, just ahead of our RVA buddies, Veritas, with 104 points.  Along with our team champion plaque, our top 5 runners were all well within the top 25, so they also earned a medal. The 6 victories today pushed our record to a perfect 30-0.  This marked our 4th victory in the past 8 years at this meet and it likely would have been 5th in the past 8 years as in 2022, our best STC XC team ever, we were not able to attend the weather rescheduled meet.  We did also win back in 2010, during the Philip Cross era where he finished runner-up in 2009 and just behind that in 2010 with a better supporting cast to lead us to our first team win in this meet.  I think our 5 titles are tied with Louisa for most victories in meet history.