2021 Arundel XC Invitational

Today's meet was a really fun experience for our athletes. This is not a course any of us were familiar with coming into today and to my knowledge DeMatha has never competed at Arundel for cross country.

The course was not an easy one with some awkward through a good portion of the first three quarters of a mile and then narrow wooded trails with a lot of steep hills, both up and down, through the middle two miles of the course. Despite that, this course produced some fast times for our athletes.

Now, on the course walk my watch measured the course at 2.93 miles. Several of our athletes (and some athletes on other teams) wore their watches during the race and measured it short, too. But Arundel's coach used a measuring wheel and it came out to exactly 5,000 meters. I still treated our results with a healthy skepticism as we went through the day because, while it certainly is tempting to take and run with "5k" results on a short course, I believe it cheats ourselves to do so, not to mention it could potentially lead to frustration down the road if we struggle to top the PRs many of our athletes wound up setting today.

With that said, after reviewing our splits and looking at each of our athletes' performances today, last week at Georgetown Prep, and three weeks ago on Centennial's 3-mile course, I feel pretty confident that today's course measurement of 5 kilometers was legitimate. I'm not entirely sure how to explain such a large discrepancy between my watch and the official course measurement. Perhaps the wooded area threw off the GPS. In any case, the official distance is 5k and I'm satisfied by the results that the distance makes sense.

One note on the Varsity A results below. With the exception of Jayden, our medalists will likely note that the place I gave them in the race is one behind what was announced when they called the Top 25 up for medals. Coach Anthony and I both got hand times at the finish line. Our hand times both tend to be very accurate, not only within a very small margin from each other but also much closer than typical hand times to fully automated timing systems. In the event that one of us misses something, the other is going to have it covered.

Our hand times matched each other within .15 seconds on all eight of our varsity athletes, yet our hand time for Jayden is the only one that matches up within half a second of his official result. For example, our hand time for Sayid is just about five second slower than his time on the official results; our hand time for Christopher is almost three second slower than his time on the official results; our hand time for Michael is about nine seconds slower than his time on the official results. So not only are those times off, but they are off by varying margins.

Now, as it turns out, our hand times for each of the seven athletes who followed Jayden match up perfectly with each of the athletes in the official results who immediately followed those seven to the line (e.g., the athlete right behind Michael in the results has a time of 18:37.52 in the official results, matching up to hand times of 18:37.65 by me and 18:37.72 by Coach Anthony). So my assumption is that there was one athlete who finished between Jayden and Sayid who the timers missed. I've already emailed the meet director about this and so this may be fixed in the official results at some point, but for now I'm going to go ahead and report those results here in what I believe is the accurate representation of them.

Without further ado, let's get to those results. As always, in blue, I have noted all athletes who set a new PR (personal record) in the cross country 5k (3.1 mile). In red, I have noted all athletes who set a new SB (season best), but not PR, in the cross country 5k.

Varsity A

Here are the results for our varsity athletes (108 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the Varsity A race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

4 Jayden Keels (Jr.) - 17:25.84 [(1) 5:19, (2) 6:08, (3.1) 5:59] PR by 20 seconds

12 Sayid Shakur (So.) - 17:57.57 [(1) 5:33, (2) 6:07, (3.1) 6:18] PR by 39 seconds

16 Christopher Toomer (Jr.) - 18:07.01 [(1) 5:30, (2) 6:18, (3.1) 6:19] PR by 47 seconds

24 Ian Parsons (Jr.) - 18:21.62 [(1) 5:29, (2) 6:20, (3.1) 6:33] PR by 55 seconds

26 Graham Fenn (So.) - 18:25.54 [(1) 5:30, (2) 6:18, (3.1) 6:38] PR by 36 seconds

28 Michael Metz (Jr.) - 18:37.52 [(1) 5:30, (2) 6:22, (3.1) 6:46] PR by 38 seconds

51 Tariq Lewis (Sr.) - 19:44.90 [(1) 5:38, (2) 6:50, (3.1) 7:17] PR by 30 seconds

76 Hayden Walsh (Fr.) - 20:35.90 [(1) 6:13, (2) 7:16, (3.1) 7:07] PR by 9 seconds

It's not often I get to put blue markings after every single results in a race. Once again I'd like to emphasis that this was not a particularly easy course. While it wound up not being as physically challenging as we thought it would be based on the course walk, the very fact that we expected slower times demonstrates the mental challenge this course brought.

Jayden has led the way for our varsity team all season and did a great job of it today. His time ties him at #51 on DeMatha's list of the 100 fastest 5k times since 2000. It also moves him up from a tie for 14th to a tie for 9th on DeMatha's 5k rankings, meaning only eight DeMatha athletes since 2000 have run a faster 5k than Jayden.

Sayid's time also got him just onto the Top 100 list in a tie for 93rd. The reason for the ties is because older results often only went to the full second, so for historical purposes I round our athletes' times to the nearest full second.

Both Jayden and Sayid are within a few seconds of recording a Top 15 time for a DeMatha athlete in their respective grades.

Every one of our athletes in the Varsity A race ran great, but I especially want to congratulate Tariq. He's been stuck with a PR of 20:15 since the Landon Invitational his sophomore year and has really been pushing himself to break the 20-minute barrier. He did it with room to spare today and has set himself up for a push at sub-19:30 by championships, if not before.

Christopher, Ian, and Hayden all managed to PR last week at Georgetown Prep. Honestly, that played into my consideration as I tried to determine how legitimate the distance of today's course was, because as challenging as parts of this course were, there was no doubt in my mind that today's course was easier than Prep's and none of those three appeared to suffer a drop in performance since last week.

As an example, if today's course was short, I would have to add 41 seconds to Christopher's time to convert from 3 miles to a 5k or 1 minute and 9 seconds to convert from my watch's measurement of 2.93 miles to a 5k. Neither of those times made sense for him today based on the eye test.

Team Results

1. Broadneck 47 points

2. DeMatha 75 points

3. Arundel 82 points

4. Sherwood 145 points

5. Crofton 152 points

...

11. Glen Burnie 278 points

These point totals might change slightly based on the addition of the aforementioned missing athlete, but the places should all remain the same.

I want to first congratulate our guys on an outstanding team result. This is the highest DeMatha has placed in any meet since I became coach, alongside our second place finish at Landon in 2019, and this was actually a slightly more competitive meet top to bottom than that Landon race.

I'd also like to point out that while our 1-5 average time was 18:00, or 19 seconds slower than Broadneck's, our gap from our first to fifth athletes was only 56 seconds, or 10 seconds less than Broadneck's. What's more, our sixth man finished about 25 seconds ahead of Broadneck's sixth man.

They had the better team today, but I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most competitive team DeMatha has fielded since 2014 and maybe since I was a student. The last time we had six athletes under 19 minutes in a race was on the blazing fast Adidas XC Challenge course in Cary, NC back in 2014. On a more normal course we have to go back to the DC-MD Private School Championship in 2013.

Varsity B

Here are the results for our JV athletes (86 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the Varsity B race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

4 William Jackson (Fr.) - 20:41.4 [(1) 6:16, (2) 7:03, (3.1) 7:22] PR by 1 minute 7 seconds

16 Desmond Holt (Sr.) - 21:54.2 [(1) 6:16, (2) 7:34, (3.1) 8:04] SB by 1 minute 48 seconds

37 Jacob Robertson (Sr.) - 23:25.8 [(1) 6:47, (2) 8:11, (3.1) 8:28] SB by 1 minute 53 seconds

38 Jackson McCormick (Sr.) - 23:27.0 [(1) 6:47, (2) 8:10, (3.1) 8:30] PR by 1 minute 4 seconds

52 Peter Brown (So.) - 25:04.7 [(1) 7:16, (2) 8:33, (3.1) 9:16] PR by 1 minute 8 seconds

53 Brendan Dougherty (Fr.) - 25:05.4 [(1) 7:23, (2) 8:47, (3.1) 8:55] PR by 1 minute 54 seconds

58 Andrew Righi (So.) - 25:40.8 [(1) 7:44, (2) 8:51, (3.1) 9:06]

61 Ian Brown (Sr.) - 26:37.1 [(1) 7:23, (2) 9:08, (3.1) 10:06] SB by 1 minute 43 seconds

73 Jaquada Moses (Jr.) - 28:20.4 [(1) 8:25, (2) 10:05, (3.1) 9:50] Virtual SB by 6 minutes 44 seconds

79 Anthony Bardonille (So.) - 29:33.4 [(1) 8:09, (2) 10:38, (3.1) 10:46] PR by 2 minutes

80 Carter Leecost (Fr.) - 29:39.4 [(1) 8:28, (2) 10:11, (3.1) 11:00] PR by 55 seconds

First, I want to congratulate the entire team on accomplishing our annual goal of having every single athlete on the team break 30 minutes. I understand that this expectation can cause some athletes a great deal of stress, especially as we get deeper into the season and they start worrying that they won't hit that goal in time for WCACs.

I'm very proud of the effort all of our athletes have put in thus far this season and now everyone is guaranteed an entry in one of the races at the WCAC Championship on October 30.

Jackson ran a heck of a race today, easily the best 5k he's put together since he started with us as a sophomore. He took about three and a half minutes off his time from last week and wound up obliterating his PR from the 2019 WCAC Championship.

Jacob is was within about 20 seconds of setting a new PR today, so that is well within reach. Ian is within 51 seconds, Jaquada is about a minute and 25 seconds away and Desmond still has about a minute and 45 seconds to go, but as you can see he started the day twice that far away from his PR on the season, so I'm certainly not counting out the possibility that he'll get there before this season is over.

Andrew is the only Varsity B athlete without a red or blue marking next to his splits, but he ran great today and is only about 10 seconds off his PR, which he set at the College Park parkrun the morning the rest of the team was at the Eagle Invitational.

Team Results

1. Broadneck 45 points

2. Sherwood 49 points

3. Southern 95 points

4. DeMatha 117 points

...

8. North County 246 points

If Hayden had run Varsity B our total would have dropped down to approximately 86 while adding some points to other teams, so we would have finished third.

Final Thoughts

I am so excited for our team. Obviously the 2nd place finish today is very exciting and energizing, but if I'm being honest it wasn't the highlight of the day for me.

During the Varsity A race, after I got our guys' mile splits, I ran over to the 2-mile mark and during my short wait for the racers to start flying by, Sherwood's coach, Dan Reeks, was talking to me. If I'm not mistaken, Coach Reeks is in his 20th year at Sherwood and his 50th year coaching cross country in Montgomery County. He was named the 2015 Mideast boys cross country coach of the year by NFHS and was a national-class runner in his own right back in the late 60s and early 70s.

I know of Coach Reeks, but we haven't run very many races with Sherwood in recent years and I hadn't really had many opportunities to converse with him in the past. He asked me how I had gotten our program running so well this year, particularly with so many programs seeing a drop in performance as we come out from the weight of the pandemic.

Obviously I'm just a small part of the success our team is having this year. Coach Anthony and Coach Hoke have both been such great additions to the coaching staff, Tariq has been a fantastic captain, all of our seniors have been excellent leaders, and the camaraderie and encouragement I see from all of our athletes day in and day out, whether at meets or at practice, far surpasses anything I've seen since returning to DeMatha in 2016; in fact, it surpasses anything I experienced as a DeMatha athlete more than a decade ago.

Continue to encourage each other moving forward, through the remainder of this season and every season to come. Our team culture has undergone a radical shift in the last six years. While I can certainly enable and encourage the sort of cultural growth we've seen, ultimately it falls on the athletes to actually follow through and create that culture and you all continue to do it and demonstrate remarkable growth year after year. As thankful as I was to our seniors last year, I'm even more thankful to this year's seniors and I hope I'll be able to say the same next year, and the year after, and the year after that when this year's freshmen are the senior leaders of our team.

Next week we get a nice low-key race at the College Park parkrun. I'll send that information out on Monday. I intend to enter and run in this one. I've seen how our workouts have manifested in your races and I'm excited to finally be able to get some payoff from the training I've done with you all.

This week's practice schedule, workouts and target training paces will be out as soon as possible so keep an eye out for those. Congratulations again to everyone on your terrific performances across the board and on varsity's second place finish!

"Second place is not a defeat. It is a stimulation to get better. It makes you even more determined." - Carlos Lopes