CA State Meet Saturday — How many Newbury Park boys can break the Woodward Park course record: 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4?

username in 2021 wrote:

What was the best team times in history for the course?

I saw the NP team set the record but am curious what are the top 5 or 10 times ever.

Besides Newbury Park's previous Top 2 times, here are the non-Newbury Records:

3. Great Oak, Temecula-SS 2015 State Meet 76:10 (NXN Champs)

4. Arcadia-SS 2010 State Meet 76:12 (NXN Champs)

5. Great Oak, Temecula-SS 2019 State Meet 76:26 (2nd at NXN to Newbury)

6. Great Oak, Temecula-SS 2018 State Meet 76:49 ( 2nd at NXN)

—— Great Oak, Temecula-SS 2019 Clovis Invit'l 76:49

7. Arcadia-SS 2012 State Meet 77:00 (NXN Champs)

*Newbury ran 73:23... so 2:47 (or 33 seconds per guy) faster than Great Oak NXN champs and 3:37 (43 seconds per guy) faster than Arcadia NXN champs.

So these NP parents don't collect rent from their children or have them pay for their own clothes and their meals? My home town was close to being middle class and I don't remember any athlete that had a part-time job during the school year.

The top guys at NP are mature, seasoned runners that are also extremely talented.

Correct! They are. I was responding to why they weren’t good before the coach showed up. The incoming talent far exceeds what was there before his arrival. Make no mistake, he’s done a good job with them, but this was not organically grown from random kids at the school who he has molded.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

Also, you can consider it luck to get the Youngs and Sahlmans, but Brosnan does seem like a charismatic guy who has built a culture that attracts talent.

There are likely 4:10/9:00 guys walking around your local HS that are doing soccer, basketball, lacrosse, or nothing at all. Brosnan is getting those guys to run, and that is a skill, not all luck.

No there are not - unless your definition of "likely" is different than mine. Just using simple statistics shows how misguided that is. There are about 24000 Public high schools and another 3K private in the in the US and if you think that 50% (usual definition meaning likely) of those have 4:10/9:00 wondering the halls guys you are very wrong. That's 13,000 4:10/9:00 runners or over 130 times the number now. If in some imaginary world you could get every kid to come out for XC and track would you produce 4x or 5x then numbers now, yeah I could see that but no, kids with that type of talent are not sitting in half the HS's in the US waiting for the right coach to find them.

Remember, talent encompasses more than just aerobic ability - you need a kid that's willing to do the work, and has the mental toughness to run that fast. Then even if they have those things - they have to get lucky to remain healthy, get in the right race, and have the right coach. Just about all (and certainly nearly all the kids doing nothing) lack one of those four things. Newberry Park is a huge statistical outlier in that they have all of those things in spades.

As for Brosnan - he obviously is a very good coach but wouldn't quite yet subscribe superpowers to him. There are a lot of very good coaches out there. Would they have had the same success? Maybe maybe not. Even with a decent coach they would have been very very good.

Eh, I’m not quite as good as them, but I probably don’t care as much about running as them I bet. Nevertheless I’m competing at the level I’m at. I’m more just sharing my personal experiences that they weren’t that nice and seemed sort of self obsessed. Their running results are impressive but there’s a lot of pro and college athletes that I’ve met that are successful and extremely welcoming. Some of them I even talked to at the invite I raced NP at! Just my side of the story, take from it what you will.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

Also, you can consider it luck to get the Youngs and Sahlmans, but Brosnan does seem like a charismatic guy who has built a culture that attracts talent.

There are likely 4:10/9:00 guys walking around your local HS that are doing soccer, basketball, lacrosse, or nothing at all. Brosnan is getting those guys to run, and that is a skill, not all luck.

You're partially right. You call it charismatic, others call it something else. He has built a culture that attracts talent, but most think of what he's doing as recruiting.

You're thinking this is a case of a high school teacher that has created the cool thing at the school that is getting a larger share of the good athletes from the school. That's not the case at all.

What's actually happening is much different. He is targeting the fastest runners in the area, regardless of where they live. Then using this charisma and culture to lure them to the school. He's having the parents, kids on team and anyone else to talk with kids from outside the school boundaries to attract really good runners to come to NP.

Somewhere like Buchanan is different. The school district has attracted and developed talent through a really strong middle school program, within the boundaries. They encourage younger kids to try the sport, get them interested and build a pipeline from within. This requires a ton of work and patience, where the NP method requires a lack of ethics.

So, he's somehow out-recruiting the entire state as a group to the point of putting down 1-4 at state, plus two more not that far back? Give me a break. He just got to come there the guys who are the top four talents in the state this season, and the best guy in the country several years ago? Were these guys the top five 8th graders in the country (as if that would be all that likely to make the top high school team of all time even if you got them)? It's just blatantly absurd to claim that he didn't coach these guys up to the best team of all time because he's expecting much more of them than any other coach, and giving them the system in which to do that. Were the Young or Sahlman families (or Aschbrenner, for that matter) known to be the greatest prospects in the country pre-high school from their family genetics of sub-13 runners? No. Give credit where it's due, even if the credit is going to a guy who is personally and politically a tool.

Yes and he deserves credit.

Oakland County wrote:

I still give German the nod over Ritz in High School. He was the better runner overall.

In what universe? Ritz dominated one of the best XC classes ever and had beat a great group of seniors the year before. Ran 13:44. Are you kidding?

Ritz’s 2000 FL run is the best HS XC performance ever. Verzbicas or Ches might be the HS GOAT but Ritz is Rushmore. German was 3rd at FL

Yep, you pretty much summarized what he’s done. Remember, it’s two families that make up the top five runners they’ve ever had. Fill that in with a few other recruits and you have the recent history. Aschbrenner, Goldstein and Appleford are the only ones in the top 10 times in NP at state that are from the actual district boundaries. He absolutely deserves the credit for getting them to the school and has done a commendable job coaching them.

Spot on!

Really? You think these guys are going to he average college runners?

typically disagree wrote:

Those Detweiller Park course records aren't in the same realm as this. The course record holder got smashed by Nico by 14 seconds. I don't know why LV couldn't run faster there but his time wasn't impressive.

I think German's time is better than Ritz's 14:10. Ritz ran on a pancake flat course.

German's only underrated because he didn't chase the 2 mile record. He ran 8:34 2-mile solo on a day with 20 mile wind gusts. Saw it in person. Had he got in a race like LV, definitely would've run faster than LV's time that he got dragged to.

For a one-off top performance, Principe's CR at Bowdoin in 2016 deserves some mention. He doesn't get the pub for it, because he fried himself doing it - only finished around 20th at NXN.

Coaches far superior to this dude.

Campolindo coach.

Dublin coach.

Buchanan coach.

Rely on teams within school boundaries.

Have to reload.

Don't make it all about their own narcissism.

2 families. Lots of recruits. Times didn't improve from early Oct to late Nov.

Stop giving him o2.

From my… Im just wondering what is meant by recruiting. Are you saying these athletes did not go to middle school in the same district? Is it open enrollment? How can they choose to go to this school - or do they just move into the district boundaries?

They move just like what used to happen at LV.

They don’t move. They just commute from wherever they live. NP is open enrollment.

Cougars *older men wrote:

Coaches far superior to this dude.

Campolindo coach.

Dublin coach.

Buchanan coach.

Rely on teams within school boundaries.

Have to reload.

Don't make it all about their own narcissism.

2 families. Lots of recruits. Times didn't improve from early Oct to late Nov.

Stop giving him o2.

Historically, accounting for team-wide performances over 20 years, I don't disagree. But recruiting or not, he's coached 4 of the top 5 fastest EVER at Woodward park. This means that if you took every high schooler in California history and magically said they were all from the same high school with the same coach, Brosnan would still have coached four 14:30 or faster guys to the theoretical coach's 1. Not to mention the girls won state in D2, and now were 2nd in D1 to the best team Buchanan has ever had. Plus Jace was pretty good, Appleford broke 9:00, Dev was 6th at SS Finals, Hector was just 9th at State... so these other non-brother runners are doing well too. I remember looking up track times and after factoring in 800-3200m times, their 14th best guy (or something like that) ran 4:27 or so. Defining a 'great coach' is difficult, but I'd rather go off stats rather than diminish what he's done because of not liking the guy.