This Past Week    
Northern Burlington Batch Meet.  This meet was important since the winner determined the Liberty Division regular season Championship.  NB's Michael Bowden and Ryan Ramirez finished 1-2, so we needed to use our depth with great runs by Wolff, Weintraub, Ems and Balch in a "come from behind" win.  There was some confusion on the course, and even with disqualifying one of our runners, we won 27-29.  Since the course was about 80 meters short, we can not count the times for PR purposes.  However, there were some stellar improvements even if 20 seconds is added to their times.  In particular, Marion Quien, Robert O'Donnell and Taylor Beckett all would have had much larger than 1 minute PR's - which is a lot!
 
South Jersey Open.  I was away, so this report is being written just by looking at the times on the Internet and getting a voice mail from Eagles.  It looks like it was a very, very good race for most of our guys.  We now have 20 guys that have hit the Varsity qualifying time of 19:00 or below - the best we have ever had in a season (17 guys last year).  We also had 25 PR's - Beckett, Carlino, Webb, Sattel, Plaut, Mejia, Cody, Briggs, Eisen, Fauvell, Thomas, Fitzsimons, Schwartz, Nece, Minnick, Shipley, Inglis, Rothenberger, Monaghan, Josephson, Wolff, Weintraub, Matteson and Ringwood.
 
On the Freshman front, Nece and Inglis stepped into the JV race to try to qualify with a sub-19:00 5K for varsity.  They both ran great - 18:25 and 18:28.  Maybe we should have done that with a couple of other freshman. Lentz (8th) and Renzi (14th) again ran great races in the Frosh race.  Even without Nece and Inglis, the Freshman notched a big victory - showing the incredible depth of this team as Lavery, Sheehan and Hendrickson came up big for the best top 5 showing in the meet.
 
In the JV race, our teams finished 4th, 6th, 11th, 17th, 24th and 31st.  Yes, that is right, we had 6 teams of 5 runners each scoring in this race!  It was obviously a great day to break PR's, and 21 of those 30 runners took advantage of the opportunity.  What is interesting is the very strong pack that seems to be emerging among the underclassmen.  It will be very interesting to see who does the work over the next year and moves up to the Varsity squad next year to fill the spots being left by the seniors.  There are some big shoes to fill, but I have a feeling that  some of these guys are really going to be prepared to step in.
 
In the Varsity race, Kingsway dominated just as they did last week at Shore Coaches.  We also got nipped by a point by Paul VI.  We ran well, with PR's by 4 of our 7 guys.  It gives us a good measure of what we need to do over the next month to get ready for Sectionals and States, and it is clear we have some work to do.
 
This Coming Week
Tuesday - Burlington County Frosh/Soph Meet.  This is a great meet for the underclassmen with great opportunities for medals based on previous year's experience.  It will be held at the Rancocas Valley Sports Complex (not the high school), and is a great spectator course since you can see them practically the entire way.  Bus leaves at 2:15.
 
Friday - Burlington County Open.  This is our last meet as a whole team together.  The competition will be very tough with Cherokee and Lenape both bringing strong teams.  This is a tough course for getting PR's, but hopefully it will stay dry and the course will be faster than last year's soggy conditions.  Varsity Girls is at 3:30, Varsity Boys at 4:00 and the Open Race (Boys and Girls run together) at 4:30.  The race is at Mill Creek in Willingboro.  The bus will leave at 2:15.