Great Start to 2017 Campaign
Wednesday, August 9 2017Today marked the first practice and first steps toward achieving our goals in the 2017 season. It was a great day and good sign of some fantastic things to come!
Perhaps most importantly, we had the largest number of athletes ever contest the 3k Time Trial that we've done each year since 2007. In fact, we had about 10 more finishers than the next closest season with 45 finishers. We had a couple DNFs and DNRs today along with a number of athletes that are still out of town and have not started yet so from a numbers standpoint, we should ultimately have a good sized team.
The coaching staff was certainly pleased with the effort this morning as guys seemed to be starting the season off with a demonstration of toughness. The results were even more pleasing since by pretty much any quantitative measure, it was the best performance as a team we've ever had in this annual tradition.
Spending some time analyzing the results from today and comparing to past years, I discovered some pretty interesting numbers.
1. Our Freshmen will be very tough this fall. We had a nice pack of 4 Freshmen that are currently 10th-13th on the all-time list. Also, in comparing to the last couple years, the '17 Freshmen would have beaten last years 17-38. They would also have beaten the current Juniors who turned into the "Super Sophs" last fall and spring. The only class they would lose to in a dual was the class that is our current Seniors and that's only because the Seniors would've put 3 in front of the #1 this morning.
2. Our sophomores have made "the jump". We had 3 under 10 and 6 under 10:40. Last year's sophomore team ultimately had 4 guys in our top 7 and they would've lost to this year's team 23-33. John Heneghan is #3 all-time, while Stage and Skibbe are 6 and 7. What's more exciting about this group is that the next 3 could potentially be right there with them in a dominating pack. Can't wait to see this group at LT in a few weeks!
3. Our team this season would've comfortably beaten any past team in the history of this time trial. They beat last year's team 21-37 and our State Team from a couple years ago 20-39 (Jack LaLonde did not do TT that day... but we didn't have Akhil, George, or Weigel today who are all returning varsity runners). We also had 9 guys sub 10 while the previous best was 5. Another impressive statistic is that our number 5 today (Rylan) is actually #14 over the past 11 years.
Today certainly showed that we have some potential to do big things this fall on ALL LEVELS. This is a testament to the hard work that was put in this summer. Great job guys!
Just a quick mention of some of the big improvements from last year:
The following guys dropped over a minute:
Grant Connolly
Matt Peloso
These guys dropped over 2:
These guys dropped over 4!
Let's stay focused and get it this year!
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