Niwot girls fend of Air Academy as EIGHTH-GRADER wins NXN Southwest and Mountain Vista rebounds

The Massachusetts "Meet of Champions" highlights an unusually drastic case of a team deprived of a quality fifth runner

Going into this morning’s collision of geographically concentrated aerobic talent just east of Phoenix, it was a bona fide toss-up as whether Niwot High School or Air Academy was the better girls’ cross-country team. What did appear indisputable was that these are not just the top two squads in Colorado, but the top two teams in the nation by a clear margin.

After today, even though Niwot won by 14 points, it would not be fair to conclude from the agate results that this would happen more than fifty percent of the time under precisely the same conditions. That is, even if God could turn back time every half-hour or so and re-run the 2023 NXN Southwest Girls’ Championship Race a hundred or more times, it’s possible that neither squad would prove itself decisively better than the other.

But these two teams are indeed mighty good. Together, Niwot (competing as REAL Training owing to the arcane rules governing “out-of-season” high-school competition) and Air Academy (registered as Academy XC Club) accounted for 10 of the top 24 scoring places in the race and 10 of the top 35 places overall.

Niwot held a 71-75 advantage at the two-mile mark, with the Cougars’ Addison Ritzenhein the nominal head of a lead pack of give girls, four of them Coloradans. Little Ritz came into the race undefeated this fall, but with her were Isabel Allori of Liberty Common High (Fort Collins) and Air Academy’s Bethany Michalak, both of whom broke 10:00 for 3,200 meters last spring. Niwot extended its advantage over the final mile almost entirely owing to slippage by the Kadets’ fifth gal and a clawing forward in the field by Niwot’s corresponding placer.

Still, the individual winner is unquestionably more of an outlier than either of these teams in terms of raw accomplishments, even though she’s competed in fewer than a dozen high-school races in her life. Gianna Rahmer, only 13 years old, became the first girl in New Mexico history to break 17:00 on a 5K championship course record at the New Mexico Cross-Country Championships one week ago. Rahmer won the 5A race by over two minutes, was the fastest girl among the state’s four divisions by 1:17, and was slower than only 25 finishers in the boys’ 5A race.

For fans of the mercurial, perhaps the biggest story of the day was the Mountain Vista girls beating Lone Peak of Utah, ranked in the top five nationwide by both Dyestat and Milesplit. A few weeks ago, this would not have looked like a big upset, as Mountain Vista was then also ranked within the top five by both sites. But the Golden Eagles laid a golden turd at the Colorado State Championships three weeks ago, tumbling all the way to fifth place. Their effort today was not only their best on the season, but probably earned them an at-large berth at the 2023 NXN National Championships in two weeks (the top two teams get automatic bids) and hence a trip to lovely and quaint European-style city of Portland, Oregon.

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Massachusetts only today held its "Meet of Champions," a misnomer anyway because the meet includes Division 1, Division 2, and Division 3 races. The events the state held had last week and called its divisional state meets were really more like the regionals or sectionals held in places where officials capable of getting this state-level nonsense done within the first half of November because they don’t hold huge invitationals close to Hallowe’en.

I have never seen a strong team suffer more for want of a fifth runner than the Boston College High School (arguably also a misnomer) boys did today in the Division 1 race.

This team was even with Brookline, a top-15 nationwide team, through three places and only 8 points behind through four places. But its fifth runner was behind the fifth runner of 16 of the other 22 teams in the race. As a result, they lost by 110 points and were 50 points behind runner-up Newton South despite a faster top-five average.

It's never a good sign when a team's fifth runner accounts for over 70 percent of its points. Even an exceptionally good team would have a hard time weathering this.

Brookline’s winning total was 54 points. This is enough to beat a team whose top five runners take places 1, 3, 5, 7, and 42 to give them 58 points, with this imaginary squad’s fifth runner accounting for very close to the same percentage of its points as B.C. High’s #5 did today. I’m sure the team principals were expecting something like this, and sometimes it’s just what happens when a team comes together. It can happen when the kid who just happens to be fifth is overperforming in every race.

But the coach still must have been in agony after the #4 runner came across in 24th place and he, she, or they waited a full minute and thirty-sex seconds for the next B.C. High runner to enter the chute. I don’t think anyone should have to tolerate whatever that felt like any more than anyone, especially billionaires, should have to tolerate the feeling of watching others legally assemble to peacefully protest human-rights violations.