The middle school state meet is like no other on our schedule.  With most of our meets home (or at Collegiate) against roughly the same local private schools, the FUMA Invite and the state meet provide a different environment than we are used to.  The boys rose to the occasion at FUMA, taking on their first 5k and other teams with a bit of extra "zip" than in the local meets.  This mental approach by the boys at FUMA served them well with great 5k times and a team title.  This state meet required a bit of extra "zip" as well, and the boys were ready to bring that today as they did three weeks ago at FUMA.  With almost 400 runners in the race and 40 scoring teams, this is a massive meet, especially when compared to anything we have run this season.  The stampede of that many runners created dust all over the course, but that did not seem to intimidate our runners.  I also think when a teammate is missing, especially one regularly in your top 5, everyone takes on a little "extra" to push and make up for that missing runner.  We typically come into this meet looking to knock off about 45 seconds from the STC Goochland 2.5 mile race, but with such cool and ideal temperatures at that race, a 30-second improvement today may have been more realistic.  The other challenge laid out for the boys was to go out aggressively and then trust our two months of training to allow us to hang on the last mile and a half while hopefully also using the sea of people to help push us to that goal.  This is not an easy ask as it does likely involve a bit more pain, but that increased discomfort would yield a positive result in a time-sense.

 

It is one thing to ask/tell the boys to go for that, and an entirely different thing to execute it, but the boys executed that improvement plan beautifully, led by Brennan's 1:31 of improvement from St. Catherine's on 10/16.  These impressive time drops also included McCoy's 59 seconds, Rand's 54 seconds, Davis' 48 seconds and Guy's 47 seconds, the latter of increased importance as Guy moved into the 5th scoring position for the team with Avery's absence.  Charlie, Henry, and Burn also dropped at least 29 seconds from St. Catherine's, making it a clean sweep for the team in terms of sizable improvement.  I will say that this improvement is not a given, looking at other runners from other teams, boys and girls, that ran at St. Catherine's and again today.  This points out something I alluded to in my last email which is the fact that we are outworking most teams during the season with what we put into our practices.  One other cool piece of improvement was that 5 of our 8 runners finished better than where they were at the halfway point of the race, including Brennan, McCoy, and Rand who all moved up at least 10 places over the second half of the race.  Charlie held steady at 13th most of the way through the race.

 

Charlie's 13th place finish was good enough for all-state honors (top 15), STC's 3rd all-state runner.  James Edward's just missed in 2022 in 17th place, but LT Nguyen was 9th that year.  Asher Green finished 6th in 2021, which is STC's best finisher in the short history of this race.  Charlie ran the 2nd best time of any STC runner ever on this course (9 seconds faster than Asher when he was 6th in 2021).  Davis ranks as the 6th fastest STC runner on this course.  And, although the attachment only has the sub-15:00 guys, I am pretty sure Henry Peace ranks 10th behind the 8 sub-15:00 guys and Chase Rhoades who ran 15:11 in 2022.

 

I have talked about our success as a team over basically the last decade, from 2015 until now, which has been from a combination of talented runners, runners willing to work and see the improvement that comes with that, and a 2-month training plan that works (as seen over and over again this season by this 2024 squad).  I would argue that we are one of the best middle school cross country programs in the state, but having a state meet would have helped solidify that statement.  This state meet is fairly new, started in 2019 and then put on hold in 2020 due to Covid, so it is still growing in size in really just its fourth year of being well attended.  Although we have only attended since 2021, our finish in this meet is another factor that indeed solidifies what I have said earlier.  And although the private school attendance is not quite as big as the public schools, this 2024 squad once again proved that we are one of the best middle school teams in the state and arguably the best private/independent middle school team in the state.  We finished first among private schools for the 4th year in a row, finished 9th among schools, and finished 10th overall, beating 7 of the 8 club teams that attended.  When you look at the top end of the schools in the results, you see Pacers Homeschool, which to me is a club, Rappahannock Ospreys, which is a club, and Blacksburg, a perennial powerhouse that has a middle school with about 1200 students (likely around 500-600 boys).  Despite these powerhouse teams, our 11-person team that brought 8 runners today, drawing from 160 7th and 8th graders (when most of these other teams also have 6th and sometimes 5th graders on their team), I think we held our own pretty well.  When you start playing the "what if?" game a bit, it is even more impressive as Avery likely puts us a solid 6th, within 20 points of being 3rd.  In addition to Avery, also add back in our top runner from last year who is playing a different sport this year, and we are likely in the runner-up position, technically first as I view Pacers Homeschool as a club, even if the state meet officials do not.  I don't make these statements to pick on Avery or Grant, but rather to point out the capabilities of our middle school.  We can hang with anyone in the state, and even without those hypothetical runners, we did that today.  And, regardless of position, we came into this meet and perfectly executed our race plan to lead to 100% improvement on the team, and no one can take that away from us.  I am very proud of the way these 8 boys ran today, and they should be too!