The boys team was an automatic qualifier into NXN, having not only the fastest team time of the day at 75:27 (15:06 average) but the fastest team time in Woodward Park course history. Let’s break this down a bit. 15:06 equates to a tad over a 4 minutes, 52 seconds per mile, for 3.1 miles, on average, for 2 high school seniors, 1 junior and 2 sophomores. Now THAT is impressive!
The previous fastest team score among all divisions was Great Oaks’ 2015 team time of 76:10. Newbury Park’s 2019 boys team destroyed that record by 43 seconds. That’s almost 3 seconds per mile per kid faster than the fastest team time of all time!
The Great Oak boys team won for the 6th straight year in the Division 1 race with a combined time of 76.23, nearly a minute slower than the record-setting Newbury Park team in Division 2, but still the 3rd fastest team score in course history (excluding Newbury Park’s new record).
However, the fastest team time DOES NOT guarantee a team win in the sport of cross country. The Great Oak team, ranked #1 in the nation recently by Dyestat, finished today’s race with an extremely tight gap of under 17 seconds between runners 1 and 5. This was today’s tightest gap of any team among all divisions.
In cross country, the team with the lowest finishing score wins the race, with a lowest possible score of 15 (1-2-3-4-5). So effectively, it does not matter how fast Nico runs when he finishes first; he still scores 1 point for the team. What often matters most is how the 5th place team finisher scores. For example, in today’s race, if the boys’ team’s 5th place finisher, who scored 19 points, finished 5 seconds slower, he would have scored 29 points. In a tight team race, 10 points is devastating. Inversely, Nico could have run 25 seconds slower and still won the race, having no impact on the team score.