Week 2 is here. We’ve had another few invitationals and more dual meets as teams are starting to tip their hands a bit. Without further ado, here are our Week 2 Power Rankings:
Top 20 Boys
- Brookline
- Cambridge
- Concord-Carlisle
- Saint John’s Prep +1
- Newton North +2
- Lexington
- Boston College High School
- Natick
- Groton Dunstable
- Reading
- Boston Latin Academy
- Catholic Memorial
- Arlington +3
- North Andover +1
- Parker Charter
- Longmeadow
- Oliver Ames
- Amherst Pelham
- Belmont
- Greater Lowell Tech
Brookline holds onto their #1 spot after comfortably taking down Natick and we got a closer look at what they’re top seven may look like. As we guessed, it’ll be a battle between six or seven runners to fill out the spots behind their front two.
There’s more movement at the top, although some of it appears to be due to some preseason favorites not being a full strength. Lexington finished fourth overall at the challenging Manchester Invitational, but unfortunately it appears as though they were missing some of their top runners. Hopefully we’ll see them at full strength by the end of the season. It’s a similar situation for BC High as they fell to Saint John’s Prep. While Prep looked every bit as good as expected, BC High was missing a few of their top runners. Hopefully no one is injured and they were just resting.
Arlington had a big over win Lexington as well and move up to the #13 spot. We don’t get to see the spy ponders much outside of the league action so this was a big one. Joining them as they make their debut on the rankings is Belmont. The Marauders have a formidable top two in Noah Geiger and Ishaan Kanagaraj. If they can close the gap between their number four and fiver runners, we’ll see them close in on the states top teams.
North Andover moved up to #14 after a strong performance out in Western Mass at the Amherst Invitational. Led by Tucker Larosa, the Scarlet Knights scored an impressive 30 points and put their top four under 17 on the difficult course. Amherst-Pelham finished in second place, led by individual winner Calvin Miller, who covered the course in 16:18.
Up this week we have some key dual meets today, as well as more invitationals this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed that the weather will hold off and we’ll get to see some great races!
3 Responses
Hey!Just so you fellas are clear, xaverian beat your #12 team and lost on a tiebreaker to your #4 team while missing Jack weintraub. Seems a little ridiculous to not include them? I know the people who run this have no clue what their talking about but minimal effort would be nice 👍.
I’m guessing this recent ranking is the result of fresh results not factored in, and not a representative set of 5k times just yet for XB. The 3-mile times look good but might not get noticed on Athletic.net or Milesplit like 5k times. Let’s see what is in the other top 20 when published on Friday.
It is better to be underestimated and climb the rankings, just ask some of the top ranked teams that have to carry those expectations through a long season.
BTW, I would like to rank teams on the strength of their fifth runner rather than the star at the top. There is much more critical scoring differences in the last scoring runners than the low sticks.
To be honest I just missed Xaverian. I didn’t realize they had Prep and Catholic Memorial to start the season off. Those were impressive performances and I’d probably slot them around 10 based off that. I miss results all the time so I have no problem with someone advocating for their team.
In regard to teams fifth runners, I agree, but it’s harder to speculate on that at this point in this season when you’re looking at results for races on courses anywhere from 2.7-3.1 Miles. Ocean State would have answered a lot of those questions but unfortunately that is no longer happening.