Boy's Cross Country: Building a Foundation Meet by Meet

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

Any team that has bigger aspirations of winning a state championships in any sport will go through a long and tumultuous road to get to where they want to end up. The road to a state championship will be dotted with hills that force the teams involved to get tough and valleys which they will be able to cruise through smoothly.

This is used only to describe things in the figurative sense but for the Middletown High School Knights Boy’s Cross Country team this may have a literal meaning as well as a figurative meaning for the Knights as Middletown goes through the season taking on whatever the season will throw at them.

Middletown had a good start to their season when they placed 10^th out of 26 teams and managed to finish up in the top of the standings, competing stride for stride with some of the top private school teams in the area.

As the Knights, move on in their season they’ll hope to build upon the base that they have created with their performance at the Seahawk Invitational with the first chance to do that being when they compete in the Rebel Invitational at South Hagerstown High School on Saturday September 9^th at 9:00 a.m.

The main base for the Knights’ success at the Seahawk Invitational came in the form of juniors Riley McDermott and Brennan Straits who finished back-to-back in 28^th and 29^th as the two Middletown juniors paced each other for the duration of the course and managed to finish even with the other.

This will not only be Straits and McDermott’s strategy throughout the season from an individual perspective but it will be the strategy that Middletown uses to achieve success this season from a team perspective as both Straits and McDermott have enough talent to set the pace for the Knights to have top-level finishes.

Middletown will get to put how well the McDermott-Straits connection works today as the Rebel Invitational will be the first meet that Middletown competes in that is filled with a majority of the teams being public school teams. And, while the foundation for the Knights is set up between McDermott and Straits, Middletown has a large degree of supporting runners who will play a big part in what the Knights hope to do in the future.

Some of Middletown’s emerging talent includes senior Kelvin Ngo, juniors Duncan Taylor, Matt Dillard, Michael Harris, and Nick Coyne will provide the Knights with stability for the upcoming season and the future in between.

The Rebel Invitational will provide Middletown with a chance to have a sneak peek of how the season will play out as not only will they face some of the similar opponents that they will see during the playoff season but also a similar course type to what they’ll see during playoffs.

The course at South Hagerstown High School is a compressed course inside the school campus that is for the most part flat until it heads into the wooded area to the right of the school which features changes in elevation forcing the runners to save energy until they get to the hills to power through them before they finish up the course.

The Middletown Boy’s Cross Country program has the foundation to be great for years. From the start of the season at South River to today at South Hagerstown the building continues.