Monroe County Championships

I've had even more than usual going on this month, and making time for blog entries ended up on the wrong side of the line between what I could get done and what I could not.  I did not want to get to the County Meet without getting online with my annual predictions.  First, let's cover the details about the meet tomorrow, then I will post a couple more entries today to cover the predictions.

The meet will be held at Parma Park (see directions at the bottom of this post - but keep driving east past "Point B" to the parking lot by the starting line).  The schedule is as follows:

• 11:15 Modified Girls
• 11:45 Modified Boys
• 1:00 JV Girls (no Schroeder entries)
• 1:30 JV Boys (9th and 10th graders only)
• 2:00 Varsity Girls
• 2:30 Varsity Boys
• 3:00 Varsity “B” Girls
• 3:30 Varsity “B” Boys
• 4:15 Awards in shelter past finish line

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Seneca Park Today

Our league meet schedule takes us to Seneca Park today to face Arcadia, Churchville-Chile, Hilton and Penfield.  On the girls side, this puts together 3 of the top 25 large schools in the state, as Penfield is #8, Schroeder is #16 and Hilton is #25, which is a rematch of last Friday's Penfield-Irondequoit invitational (results are here).  The boys will have the unusual opportunity to face the three teams ranked immediately ahead of them in the Monroe County computer rankings, as Schroeder is #12, Hilton is #11, Penfield #10 and Arcadia #9.

Scoring today's meet as an invitational, the computer predicts the following very close result:
Penfield 53
Arcadia 55
Hilton 62
Schroeder 63
C-C 112

So, expect to see several dual meets today that are 26-29, 27-28 or even 28-28 and the sixth runner will break the tie.

8-0!

The boys and girls teams combined to go 8-0 on Tuesday in our league meet with Rush Henrietta, Canandaigua, Batavia and Eastridge.  The girls race turned out to be a bit anti-climatic as RH chose to sit stars Siobhon Quinn and Alex Cooper, currently ranked 9th and 10th in the state, who were coming off fantastic races at McQuaid, allowing our girls to take the top 5 places against RH.  As Kennedy Jensen of Canandaigua was also sitting out after a late-night return from an Ivy college visit (I guess her brain moves as quickly as her legs), our girls were able to take 5 of the top 8 places overall (and it would have been 5 of 7, if not for Dana Garbinski's incredible speed down the stretch).

The boys had a tougher meet, but rose to the occasion as Kevin, Justin and Zach went 3-4-5, Ray cracked the top ten and Kade came on strong to fill in for Peter, who was still ill but made a strong effort to help out.  In the end, we had five runners in before anyone else had four, and managed surprisingly wide margins of victory over the much-improved Batavia team, and a solid Canandaigua team.  Mickey Burke also took the race off, coming off of his unbelievable record-setting race at McQuaid, where he ran 14:25, allowing us a comfortable win over RH as well.

Yesterday and Today

The only real "yesterday" part is that I did not have time to post anything about the McQuaid Invitational.  Our top story there was that the girls pulled off a shocking 9th place finish in a loaded Large School seeded race, which included the top-ranked team in the country finishing second!  We managed to be the third-best Section V team, behind our closest neighbors in the Section: Thomas and Penfield, but finishing ahead of Hilton, Fairport and Rush-Henrietta, and far exceeding our "tenth-best" Section V ranking.  In the "merged" results (this is where they put all of the races together and pretend it was one race), R-H slipped by us as they had a ninth-grader finish third in the Sophomore race.  She would have broken into their top five in the Varsity race, thus lowering their merge score.

This is where the Today part comes in, as fate would have it, our league meet against R-H is scheduled for today, and we will get a quick rematch of Saturday's race, just three days later.  It should be an interesting race, and should include Kennedy Jensen, one of the top runners in the country (not just Monroe County), who was a precautionary last-minute scratch at McQuaid.  We have not beaten Canandaigua since they entered the league in 2009, but have the opportunity to do so this year.  Batavia and Eastridge are our other opponents.

On the boys side, McQuaid was a solid race, and we placed 9th in the unseeded large school race.  The boys have not beaten Rush-Henrietta since 2005, and also have close competitors in Canandaigua, and even Batavia today.

Complete McQuaid results are available here.

For today's meet, we return to Center Park for the second time this year - it is located on Ayrault Rd, just east of Turk Hill.

More McQuaid Race Outlooks

A quick look at the top teams in the other seeded races (ignoring most out of state and Canadian teams)...

Boys A
East Aurora - still Class B (#10) for one last year, but qualifies for a small school at McQuaid!
Alden - #3 in Class C
Barker - #3 in Class D, but more battle-tested than ER
East Rochester - #2 in Class D
Marcellus - #7 in Class C
Pawling - #9 in Class C
Wheatland-Chili - #7 in Class D
Weedsport - #9 in Class D

Girls A -  28 schools, largest seeded race of the day
East Aurora - #1 in Class B
Maple Grove - #1 in Class D
Skaneateles - #2 in Class C
Tully - #2 in Class D
Alden - #6 in Class C
[Akron - #7 in Class C is running unseeded for some reason]
[Fredonia - #10 in Class C is running unseeded for some reason]
Notre Dame - Batavia - #9 in Class D

Girls AA
Burnt Hills - #3 in Class B
Sweet Home - #5 in Class B
Pittsford Mendon - #13 in Class B
HF-L - #14 in Class B
Starpoint - #19 in Class B
Walsh Jesuit is usually very strong in the boys race and may make a splash here
[Canandaigua = Kennedy Jensen is running]

Boys AA

Burnt Hills - #1 in Class B

Walsh Jesuit

Brighton - #5 in Class B

Pittsford Mendon - #6 in Class B

E. Syracuse - Minoa - #15 in Class B

Sweet Home - #16 in Class B

Boys AAA

F-M - #1 in Class A
Liverpool - #3 in Class A
Webster Thomas - amazingly unranked in Class A
Clarence - #6 in Class A?
West Genesee - #9 in Class A
Ithaca - #10 in Class A
McQuaid - #14 in Class A
Fairport - #15 in Class A
Central Square - #18 in Class A
[Rush Henrietta = Mickey Burke is running]

McQuaid Invitational

Once again the McQuaid Invitational is upon us.  It looks to be bigger than ever this year, with over 7000 runners entered.  Here is a link to their main page, a link to the schedule, and a link to some parking information.  Our races are as follows:

1:03	Race #14	Sophomore Boys (All Schools)
2:26	Race #18	Girls Varsity "B" (a J.V. race) for Medium and Large schools
2:50	Race #19	Boys Jr. High #3 (Large schools)
3:26	Race #21	Girls Jr. High #3 (Large schools)
3:38	Race #22	Boys Unseeded Varsity AAA-2 (large schools)	Mike Diggins Memorial
3:58	Race #23	Girls Seeded Varsity AAA (Large schools)
4:45	Race #25	Boys Varsity "B" (A J.V. race) for Large schools

I've done some scouting of the Girls race, but their is a great deal of uncertainty in these numbers because of the mix of teams involved.  There should be no debating the first two teams, F-M and Unionville, but there should be a lively battle for the next ten places.  Webster Thomas does not appear on any state rankings, and are only ranked third locally, but they looked tough on Tuesday without their #2 runner, and beat Penfield 23-32 on Penfield's "home" course last week.

1	FM	60
2	Unionville	109
3	Webster Thomas	148
4	Penfield	165
5	Corning	186
6	Rush-Henrietta	196
7	Westdale Secondary S	197
8	Fairport	199
9	Hilton	210
10	Elmira District	220
11	Clarence	220
12	Webster Schroeder	258
13	Ithaca	281
14	West Genesee	289
15	Central Square	353
16	Williamsville N	371
17	St.Aloysius Gonzaga-	443
18	Horseheads	455
19	Auburn	492
20	Tyburn Academy	525

Maybe some more coming later tonight...

Today's Meet

We are hosting the league meet today.  The girls will have a tough time with Thomas - in addition to the two fast ninth graders that they added, they picked up a new tenth grader that is fast, and Laura has improved quite a bit, giving them four top runners.  We should be able to handle the other schools as Sutherland drops off very quickly after Mary Visca, Victor's pack is a bit behind ours, and Odyssey is down following the retirement of their coach who has a young family.

The boys aren't expecting to have any close team scores today, but should have plenty of individual competition as the Thomas and Sutherland have a large number of runners near our top boys (not to mention a large number of runners overall).

The Boys race starts first at 4:30pm (risk of delay is fairly low with the teams that are attending), followed by the Modified races (the boys usually get a two-minute head start), which should being a little after 5, and the Girls will follow, most likely just after 5:30.

Today marks the last chance for our eleven seniors to race on our home course - best of luck to all of them!