9/9 News and Notes

The Week in Review

Coming out of Labor Day weekend, last week was a short one for our team.  We spent Tuesday and Wednesday preparing for Thursday's meet, both in the running and non-running senses.  That included our team potluck, where the Legion chicken was a hit as always.  Our runners put a pretty big dent in the dessert options as well.

You can see more about our home meet below, but on Friday we did have a little fun with the elementary students at after school care by inviting them into our game of kickball.  Our senior boys served as captains.  What looked like a blowout victory for the Flooders (Noah's team) ended up coming down to the last out, as the Sneakers (Ethan's team) staged a last minute comeback that ended one run short.  25-24 Flooders was the final score.  Unfortunately my phone did more texting, calling, and emailing about the meet than photography, so I don't have any pictures to share here.

Home Meet Recap

When the forecasts first appeared, our meet was shaping up to have weather comparable to what we saw this past weekend.  However, with each day the predicted high rose.  Going into Thursday we were facing temperatures near 90°.  Thankfully the humidity was relatively low.  The races were hot, but we've seen much worse in the history of our meet.

All told we had 19 schools at our meet.  Like high school athletes, middle school runners are required to attend 14 days of practice before racing.  However, their official practices start a week later than high school.  The earliest day they could possibly race was last Wednesday.  Unfortunately between Labor Day and later starts to the school year, many teams like Perryville Middle School were unable to get enough practices in time for our meet.  

However, the middle schools that did make it gave us an exciting start to the day.  Our official was a little late arriving, so I had the privilege of starting the middle school boys race.  I asked them at the line if this was their first race ever.  Over half of them raised their hand.  The value of middle school cross country is to give a fun introduction to the sport.  I hope we were able to provide that to many of the runners.  Maybe one day there will be some blue and gold in that mix as well!

The excitement continued in the high school races.  Our home meet is my least favorite as a coach because it's the one I get to see the least of.  I spent most of my evening within 100m of the finish line, so my take on things this time is based almost entirely on splits and secondary sources.

I thought the meet record might fall in the boys race.  Perryville's Bair Hopkins didn't disappoint with his first-place time of 16:42.  One can question the impact of the new route, but when you beat the previous record by 30 seconds, there isn't really much room left for conversation.  

Records also fell for our team.  Carter's second-place time of 17:19 was the fastest by an SV runner in our home meet's history, besting Levi Krauss's previous record by 12 seconds.  It also beat out Andrew Lipe's 17:29 for the fastest time by a sophomore boy in program history.  Carter was the lone medalist for our boys.

For 6 of our remaining 8 boys, this was their first 5k in at least a year.  It was also Noah W.'s race debut for the season.  The tendency--especially at this point in the season--is to overestimate what we can do given the heat and our current fitness levels.  That means going out too fast in the first mile before fading in the second mile.  Sometimes they bounce back in the last mile, but not to the pace they started.  The better approach--one used by the vast majority of elite runners--is to start fast but conservatively, hold close to that pace over the second mile, and then start to pick up the pace over the last mile, especially the final 1000m or so.  Assuming the course doesn't end with a barrage of hills, we want the last mile to be the fastest.  Sometimes even slowing the first mile down by 10-15 seconds can mean staying strong enough to run the second mile 40 seconds faster.  This is a skill that takes practice, one we'll be working on this week and beyond.

Out of twelve teams, our boys finished 9th.  Considering the size of some of the schools ahead of us, that isn't bad.  We also have to take into consideration the relative youth of our team, as evidenced by the graphic below.  Looking at the grades of the scoring five for each school, you can see that we are much younger (and more inexperienced) than almost all of the teams above us.  

In the girls race, Valle's Madelyn Griffard was able to repeat as champion, but her winning time of 21:05 was well shy of the meet record.  For our team, Abby (9th) and Anna (13th) each earned medals.  Our team record for the meet remains in Corin Carroll's hands, but we did see some changes in the top ten.  Abby improved on her 8th place time by 9 seconds, but that wasn't quite enough to move into 7th.  In her debut race, Anna displaced Cailyn Prost to move into 10th on the all-time list for our meet.  She also ran the 9th fastest time by a freshman in team history.  

This is where the all-time rankings for our home meet stand after last Thursday.

On the whole, I would say our girls ran smarter races than the boys, likely due to their experience.  There are still some tweaks to make with pacing, but we saw many more negative splits with the ladies.  In a race that found a lot of girls from other teams woozy, staggering, and down for the count at the finish line, we looked much stronger overall.  That includes Audrey, who powered her way toward the finish line to run a new personal best.  I think that's a testament to the consistency we showed over the summer building up our aerobic engines.  The other side of the equation to begin improving is our comfort with discomfort as we push the pace in the later miles.  This another thing that our race-pace workouts will target going forward.

Out of 6 teams, the girls finished 4th.  That's actually pretty impressive considering the teams ahead of us.  We were within striking distance of Class 4 schools Perryville and Ste. Gen and even beat Class 5 Mehlville.  Also of note is that neither Oak Ridge nor Bernie--both our district rivals last year--have enough girls on their roster to score as a team.  Should our girls end up back in Class 1, that would definitely impact the teams on our radar.​

The Week Ahead

This week will mark our third in a row with a race, though this time with a bit wider of a gap.  That means we can fit in a legit race-pace workout on Tuesday and a full-fledged course preview on Wednesday.  Wednesday will also include some fútbol (read soccer) fun.  After that it's gearing up for Saturday's race.

​District Sites Announced

One bit of news in the last week is that the state released the sites for district races.  While MSHSAA has yet to announce the district assignment of individual teams, Classes 1-3 for a particular district will all run at the same location.  There's really zero possibility that either of our teams would end up in any class higher than that.  Our geographic location also places us somewhat firmly in District 1.  Therefore, we can safely say that both our teams will run at Arcadia Valley for districts this year.

If my math is correct, our team has run districts at Arcadia Valley five different times.  That's far more than any other location.  It's also a place we get to preview during the season.  While it might not be as close as Notre Dame, I think our team should be fairly excited about this information.  The last time both our boys and girls teams qualified for state together was there in 2017.  Maybe we can recapture some of that magic seven lucky years later.  

Arcadia Valley Meet Preview

Speaking of Arcadia Valley, we race there on Saturday.  The course will be the same then and at districts.  Essentially it's two big loops followed by a stretch of deceptively long switchbacks.  Otherwise the course is flat and a bit muddy if it rains.  Even then, with some reasonably mild temperatures, it's a very fast and unchallenging course.  The key to success is not letting the ease of the first loop lead to overcooking the start.  The course is also narrow in places, so runners need to be strategic with their passing and hold enough stamina to keep passing through the switchbacks.

There will be a few key differences between Saturday and November 2.  The number of schools will actually be lower this weekend, but the difference is they'll all be in the same race.  That means nearly double the teams from our meet.  A more crowded course does impact decisions about pacing.  More importantly, the starting boxes will be microscopically small.  Last year they measured less than two feet across (our meet does the regulation 6 feet by comparison).  Our runners will pretty much have to line up single file. 

Unlike Districts, Saturday's meet will also include middle school and JV races.  The first isn't that significant to us other than pushing back our race times toward warmer hours.  But the second means we have to split up our runners across two races in ways that aren't automatically decided by age.  Ultimately these decisions follow a great deal of thought on my part.  They also apply to each meet individually.  Our next two meets don't have separate JV races, but when we get to Notre Dame and Conference, the arrangements could look very different.  Ultimately I take a number of factors into consideration:

-Entry Limits:  While a school can run as many JV runners as they want, most races limit a team's varsity squad to no more than seven runners.

-Scoring Minimum:  A team must have five runners in a typical race to score.  Any additional runners serve as surplus (and the occasional tiebreaker), but anything less means a school won't receive a team score.  In situations where our team could be competitive or we want to see how our score would stack up, making sure we have five runners in the race is important.  However, one can always just compare times across all of the races and get a pretty comparable takeaway.

-My Personal Sportsmanship Opinion on JV Runners:  Unlike other sports, cross country doesn't prohibit juniors and seniors from running JV races.  However, my personal opinion is that if a coach foresees a healthy junior or senior with running experience being part of their scoring team at districts, the coach shouldn't run them in JV races.  Similarly, I think healthy sophomores who won a medal at districts as a freshman shouldn't run JV races so long as they are still in the team's top seven runners.  Many coaches at other schools don't adhere to these ideals and will stack their JV teams at more competitive meets just to win a team trophy.  However, I try to stand by my principles on this.

-Medal Contention:  Sometimes a freshman or sophomore runner stands to be more competitive and possibly even medal in the JV races even though there's space for them to run varsity.  This could be a huge boost of confidence for them that will ultimately propel them into success for the varsity team in races later in the season.  Sometimes that's more valuable than a full varsity squad, or even one that scores.

After weighing all of these factors, our race lineup on Saturday will look as follows below.  

While all schools will run together in each race, team finish times will be sorted into small (Class 1-2) and large (Class 3-5) for team scoring purposes.  These will also apply to individual places in the varsity races only, where the top 20 runners will receive a medal.  In the JV races, the top 25 finishers overall will win a medal.  The top team per division in each race will receive team medals.  I think our JV boys could certainly make a run at that.

On the boys end, the fastest seed time for the meet belongs to Woodland's Calvin Layton at 16:31.  He is also the second fastest returning runner from last year's meet behind Dexter's Cameron Bell.  On the girls side for Class 1 and 2, it is familiar face Madelyn Griffard from Valle with a 19:47.  She is also the highest placing runner returning from last year in those classes, finishing behind three runners from larger schools.  The meet record for the boys was set by Sam Shipp of Fox in 2022 at 16:25.  The girls record also belongs to a Fox runner, this time Isabella Marcum's 18:39 from 2021.

For our team records, I keep district times separate from the regular season meet.  Both records for the latter were set last year.  The fastest boy time belongs to Jackson Unterreiner with a 17:29.  On the girls end, Abby set the record at 23:39 and will look to improve upon that on Saturday.