The Best High School Cross Country Runners Of All Time

I was going to address this same idea before, but it would have made the post even longer and probably unreadable. It's actually the 5k that's a better predictor of cross country performance than the track 10k, even for the college cross distances of 8k and 10k. There might be any number of reasons why, but that's how the numbers crunch. I suspect it's because the "foot to the floor" nature of the 5k simulates the distress of cross more so than the 10k on the track, where if you run a good one, you're settled into a rhythm for long enough that you can make small adjustments if you do start to labor midrace. In the 5k, as in cross, the distress in more acute. Once you get in the hole, you're there for the rest of the race and you'd better be tough and able to operate in that state. Yeah, that does happen in the track 10k at some point, but it's not as pronounced as in either the track 5k or in cross, and more of your track 10k comes down to execution than agony.

Michigan coach (former W&M coach) Alex Gibby also shares this sentiment about the track 5k being a better indicator of cross country success than the track 10k. You might counter with the view that in high school, a great 10k runner, a mileage monster like Hulst or Chapa, would be bound to have the edge in a really tough cross race over the lesser trained guys who stuck with their track stuff and focused on the 2 mile. And the longer the cross race was or the more grueling the terrain was, the more you might be right. But hs cross has always been 2 miles to 5k and most of the courses the tens of thousands of hs guys have run on over the decades have been moderate in difficulty. On some courses, Hulst would have dominated guys who were normally giving him a race on shorter courses or easier terrain. He was a monster and he often hammered those things from the front like Bedford. Nobody could stay with him at the US jrs or at world jrs, 8k-ish courses with all those 3-foot steeple barriers and gulleys, and anybody who tried to force it would have gotten their pumpkins busted. But on your typical hs course that people run week after week, his advantage dwindled and he found himself with company much later in the races.

I can't be any more sure than anybody else, but I honestly think a few guys from the last decade, and of course a few more from the old days, could beat Hulst on most courses, even up to 8k. I also honestly believe Chapa, while obviously great, was no better a cross country runner than Hulst and a few of the more recent guys would also beat him head to head. That's just the way I see it. Can't know for sure, can we?

That's why we have to make guesses and debate about who was better in cross. No way to know for sure. I'm just telling you what I think and defending that view per my own criteria of how I'd rank 'em, both heads up and in terms of accomplishments. But yeah, even a 10-second advantage in a 2 mile on the track might not be enough for one guy to beat another on a challenging cross country course, and most of these guys are close enough in their track times that it would boil down to who's better specifically at cross. But when there aren't identical courses to compare and when all the main players are widely known to be or have been excellent at cross, I'm still picking the 8:40 guy over the 8:44 guy in a hypothetical cross country matchup.

And I won't even entertain the thought that a 9:00 guy who beat a bunch of other 9:00 guys in an era where "8:55 is the new 8:45" would beat an 8:34-8:46 guy, I don't care how good the 9:00 guy supposedly was at cross. 9:00 guys who only have to beat slower guys to be the best in the country that year aren't as good at running as an 8:4x guy who beats a bunch of other 8:4x to 8:5x types. With maybe an exception or two, hs cross country in the 90s was barely even the same sport it was in the 70s. It's like that documentary about SMU's football team coming back from the death penalty. It showed them trotting out on the field to play Texas and they looked like little kids out there. It was half comical, half worrisome. Make no mistake; they were actually pretty good football players. They must have beaten out a lot of other guys to get those roster spots. But they didn't belong on the same field as some of the teams they would have to face. That's about the difference between 70s running and 90s running. Running around 9:00 is always a fine hs performance. But it's not in the ballpark of an all time great performance, and a bunch of 9:00 track guys don't belong on the same cross country course as a bunch of 8:3x-8:4x guys.

Point taken. On certain tough 5k courses or on a longer, unfamiliar and pretty tricky course, like that one with tall barriers I mentioned Hulst winning US jrs on, Fernandez might tank it. He does seem to forget his Midol before some of the biggest cross races. But when I mention a head to head fantasy race, I'm still talking about people having their best days. Fernandez is not a "poor" cross runner just because he lost the big one in hs, got himself injured at NCAAs, etc. Most of the CA invite courses might not be the best indicators of what will happen at Foot Locker finals, and the South region has an even bigger problem with this, but the Cali folks can't all have forgotten the names Hulst, Hunt, Serna, Nelson, Moses, Reynolds and Davis, can they? And there's nearly universal consensus that Fernandez did in fact have an all time highlight race with that 14:24, which beat the course record of Marc Davis (who became the national champion that year) by 14 seconds.

Alright, I'll give you some rope and admit if Fernandez didn't like a particular course - or felt like he had a little sand you know where because he wasn't way out in front - that a good number of all time stars might gobble him up and spit him out. But "poor" at cross? Naaah. I say on his best day, you could count on one hand the number of hs runners in history that could beat him. He wouldn't fare "poor"ly if the distance was longer either. He did win the US jrs. in hs and beat redshirting Iona frosh Ryan Sheridan and trounced VA frosh Emil Heineking. Heineking had made NCAA All American that fall and Sheridan would make it the next fall. Oops, I broke my own rule and talked about how good someone was going to be in the future. But Sheridan couldn't have been shabby in 2008 either. Draw your own conclusions. I say the est version of Fernandez was an all time stud hs cross country runner and would beat nearly all the others on that best day but his competitive record as a whole obviously doesn't warrant ranking him anywhere near the top 10 if you're heavily favoring honors won when figuring the the rankings.