Around the League

Sorry, this was supposed to be posted last night.

Black Creek Park

The Hilton boys, still not at full strength defeated HF-L, still without Hoose, 24-31 in what looks like an interesting race, as HF-L was just 16 seconds away from picking up 4 points. In the girls race, Hilton’s top 4 ran together, well back from HF-L’s top 5.

Center Park

It was Arcadia’s Lou Lipani’s turn to outrun Travis Jordon of Gates-Chili for the win, leading Arcadia to an easy win. The Canandaigua girls took 8 of the top 10 spots to win easily.

Mendon East

It looks like this was an exciting place to be this week, with the Brighton, Mendon and Thomas boys squaring off. Brighton was led by Scotty Smolensky’s comfortable margin of victory over Jared, then their next 4 were within 15 seconds of each other to all finish in the top 10 as they defeated Mendon, 22-34 and Thomas, 25-32. Mendon edged Thomas, 28-28 with the sixth man displacing and breaking the tie. Cole was just one second behind Drew Zeccola, and Thomas is still relying on 3 freshman and a sophomore behind their big 3.

For the girls, Mendon seemed to take it a bit easy, after their top 3 went 1-2-3 overall to clinch all of the dual meets. Thomas took 5-8, with Molly just a bit farther back.

Parma Park

R-H (did you see their nice write-up in today’s D&C?) ran their top guys for an easy win. Brockport, with their 5th man still over 2 minutes back (but closing the gap), took advantage of MJ Erb sitting out to defeat Victor 28-29. The deciding spot was Brockport’s 4th man finishing two seconds ahead of Victor’s 3rd. There was no sign of R-H’s 8th grade girl in the results, and they lost to Victor, 27-28.

Webster Park

AJ became the first runner to break 16 minutes on this course in a meet other than the battle of the unbeaten teams that culminated the 2008 season. Sutherland’s 2-5 finished 9 seconds apart, between Geoff and Justin M to secure the win over Schroeder, 24-33. The individual surprise was the third place finish by Athena’s Alex Ngabo – making him the third fastest newcomer to Monroe County XC, behind only R-H’s Mickey Burke and Nick Watson.

The girls race featured the hometown Schroeder Warriors against state-ranked teams from Fairport (4th in Class AA), Penfield (18th in AA) and Sutherland (10th in A). It drew the largest crowd I’ve seen for a league meet, in quite some time. It was a very exciting race, with Fairport’s Ashton Hughes splitting up Penfield’s dynamic duo of Leila Mantilla and Katie Lembo, to allow Fairport to hang on for a 27-28 win. The Schroeder girls really stepped up with Val and Amanda posting the best Schroeder times on this course by nearly a minute (19:30 and 19:31) and Annelise and Sarah finished comfortably ahead of Sutherland’s 3-6 pack to secure a 25-31 upset over Sutherland.