New Saucony Top 50 and its meaning for Northeast Teams

No surprises that NJ’s Christian Brother Academy’s record breaking average time of 15:52 kept them in the number one ranking. I do not know if the Holmdel course has changed much over the past few years, but I went back to the year 2000 and marked the number of guys sub 16: 

·         2000 – 1

·         2001 – 6

·         2002 – 5

·         2003 – 8 (Mohamed Khadraoui as a junior ran 15:22)

·         2004 – 2

·         2005 – 6

·         2006 – 6 (Craig Forys ran 15:15.11 as a senior. Wins by 30 seconds)

·         2007 – 2

·         2008 – 5

·         2009 – 11 (Joe Rosa as a junior ran 14:56 and Jim (twin) ran 15:15)

·         2010 – 11 (15:14 win by Jim Rosa. Morgan Pearson (recently 16^th @ NCAAs was 5^th in 15:38)

·         2011 – 12 (Tim Ball win in 15:31)

·         2012 – 12 – Without the CBA guys who were taking the weekend off. I would guess around 2 of them would have broken it, considering McClemens did it as a sophomore (year before)

As we can see it for the most part there has been an upward trend the past few years since 2009. I’m not sure if the course was made easier or the talent in NJ has gotten better, but guys like Craig Forys (DMR national champion, and multi time MoC winner with doubles in the 1600 and 3200) still were able to run very fast times on the course. And guys like Mohamed Khadraoui went on to become a 3 Time All-American at Iona in XC. What I’m getting at here is that the Meet of Champions at Holmdel has still produced very fast times from extraordinary runners during “slow” years. This season we saw 18 people break 15:56 while before this the most in a year was 12 breaking 16:00. I feel as though it is safe to say that this year was extremely fast and to chalk up CBA running 15:52 (which is very, very impressive, I won’t deny it) as better than they were in 2011 when they won nationals (16:04 average at Holmdel), is ridiculous in my opinion. This squad is clearly very strong and I would mark them as top 5 in the nation, but Saucony seems to be overlooking how fast the results are this season.

BUT in terms of sending teams to nationals this is great for the Northeast region. With the Saucony guys so up on CBA I have no doubt that they’ll be forced to send at least one squad with an At-Large bid. Having 5 teams racing that are in the top 25 (US #1 CBA, US#13 WCH, US#17 Don Bosco, US#19 Pembroke, US#24 O’Hara) and not in the race is US#20 North Allegheny.

California’s Warren (US#10) shocks US#4’s Arcadia moving them down just one place. This brings California four teams in the top 10 now, making it more difficult for two Northeast teams to make it with At-Large bids. 

On some positive news for the Northeast however is that Central Catholic was moved down to US#18 and Hinsdale Central was moved to US#23, make them less likely to get At-Large bids. 

--ForrestCRN

P.S. http://ny.milesplit.com/articles/116905-nike-cross-nationals-northeast-regional-preview#_=_ is the preview from Milesplit on the Northeast Regional. I encourage everyone to check it out. Post there or here with comments on the article. His take is very, very different from mine. A little bit of difference in opinion is a good thing :)