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

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.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

runnER/DR wrote:

It'll be a fascinating science experiment to see how the Newbury kids do in college. It's obvious they have a lot of talent, but even more obvious they're extremely well trained.

Some of you guys are obsessed with the effects of coaching but the NP kids would just as good at hundreds of other HSs. Their coach won the lottery twice to have such talented sets of brothers run there.

No doubt they would be good, but not as good as they are with his coaching. He does seem like a pretty big D-bag, but kudos to him for keeping all that talent on the rails and focused on collective excellence. Lots of coaches would've been content with them winning states averaging 15:10. He set the bar higher and coached 'em to become the greatest HS XC team ever. That does not happen without his coaching.

I think Tuohy's 16:21 at Holmdel is the greatest girls XC performance of all time. Brutally hard course and she broke the existing record by over 1:10, which every NJ girl has run on since the 70's. 16:20 is a damn good guys time at that course as well.

certified killers wrote:

birdbeard wrote:

Do you really believe that? You think that a lot of coaches could score 16 points in the biggest division in the biggest state just because of the talent?

No chance. Brosnan seems like a huge douche but clearly has the coaching elements right.

Yup. It’s a bit of everything. He couldn’t have done it without the talent, but he’s also responsible for developing that talent. Brosnan has some weird god complex or is a sociopath or something along those lines but he’s chosen to direct all of that energy into coaching high school cross country. Without him, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to witness this team. And next years team. It’s incredible stuff.

Kids that talented are going to be self-motivated. Getting down to the Xs and Os, what training regime has Brosnan developed that has revolutionized HS distance running?

The reality is that it's takes a freakish combination of top-end speed, stride efficiency and strength to run as fast as their top 3 did and it has nothing to do with coaching. He currently has 3 German Fernandez level talents and a 4th that has already graduated. The odds of that happening at one HS must be a billion to 1.

typically disagree wrote:

I think German's time is better than Ritz's 14:10. .

I’m assuming Ritz ran that at MIS.

I was coaching in Michigan when we went to using that f-ing joke of a course for all classes. I was one of many coaches who were vehemently opposed, and became even more so after the first finals there.

It’s a fraud. It isn’t even cross country. It’s a track meet on trails.

I think that many coaches like it because every kid finishes the season with a PR and they look like geniuses for having their athletes “peak perfectly.”

The best indicator of what kids from Michigan can do are from their Regional or track times.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

GermanMissile wrote:

Nobody breaks GF’s insane record, and Aaron Sahlman runs slower than his Clovis time, but Newbury Park breaks the State meet team points record (16), overall Woodward Park time record (73:23), and State meet margin-of-victory record (103 points over Great Oak).

Their team average time (14:41) was 10 seconds faster than any other boy ran on the course all day.

Lex, Leo, and Aaron still have 2022 to try to break the Fernandez record, but today further proved that it’s an absolute beast of a record.

“Margin of victory” record is kinda of odd. Wouldn’t it be more impressive if the margin of victory were lower? If your margin is really high, then it means you had softer competition.

Winning 16-39 is more impressive than 16-109.

No, margin of victory is a legitimate record and more is always better. Due to the Law of Large Numbers, we can assume that the rest of the field is going to produce a #2 team with a more consistent ability/performance than the #1 team, if that makes sense. So if the difference is very large between #1 and #2, we can assume it is likely due to the #1 team being very good rather that the whole rest of the field failing to produce a good number #2. This will make much more sense if you are familiar with the concept of a bell curve or normal distribution.

The ability of each team as you go from best to average will become more and more predictable as you go along, if that makes sense. For example the team score of the #1 has a high level of natural variation, it will vary a lot year by year. The score of the 7th place team, for example, will be within 10 points of its average almost every year. So since the number two team experiences slightly less variability, we can pretty much treat it like it is a constant. So if the margin of victory is large its from the number 1 team, not the number 2 team, the 2 team is always more stable.

I feel like I just said the same thing twice, but whatever, hopefully one of them made sense.

And you are right to some degree, because margin of victory over 2nd place is not really the best measurement, its totally possible that every single team was exceptionally bad one year, and one team was just kinda good, but it resulted in a huge margin of victory (even though as explained above it is still more likely that the difference comes from the abillity of the first place team). A much better metric would be how far the winning team was away from the average score. That metric would be very safe from natural ability as the average of all the teams hardly varies at all by year, so virtually all of the difference would be explained by the winning teams ability.

xcrunner22765 wrote:

I think Tuohy's 16:21 at Holmdel is the greatest girls XC performance of all time. Brutally hard course and she broke the existing record by over 1:10, which every NJ girl has run on since the 70's. 16:20 is a damn good guys time at that course as well.

also 16:06 at ocean state. cr by 90 seconds and won outright on the day. i think sherry has the boys record there in 14:53

freekiprop wrote:

GBPUSD = 1.39 wrote:

German's 14:24 Woodward is also probably the second greatest individual HS XC performance ever, behind Ritz's 14:10 MI state win. Other contenders are Craig Virgin's 13:50 (and LV's 13:53), Sarah Baxter's absurd 2012 NXN win, and Ritz and LV's 2000 and 2010 FL wins respectively...but 14:24 solo at Woodward is otherworldly.

some more modern ones for consideration, neither lv or virgin actually have the detweiller course record anymore, nico ran 14:28 solo allegedly “holding back” at woodward, and even better was his nxn win. 14+ seconds over one of the best fields of all time and a 7 second course record in the rain and mud.

Verzbikas win over cheserek, gedyon, Lutz, moussa in 2010 was superior to me. Especially considering he had footlocker regionals before it. Cheserek was a 840 guy by then if I'm not mistaken

The latest rage wrote:

SDSU Aztec wrote:

Some of you guys are obsessed with the effects of coaching but the NP kids would just as good at hundreds of other HSs. Their coach won the lottery twice to have such talented sets of brothers run there.

No doubt they would be good, but not as good as they are with his coaching. He does seem like a pretty big D-bag, but kudos to him for keeping all that talent on the rails and focused on collective excellence. Lots of coaches would've been content with them winning states averaging 15:10. He set the bar higher and coached 'em to become the greatest HS XC team ever. That does not happen without his coaching.

You're making stuff up. Of course kids that talented would go after a legendary CR. If he had told them to run 15:00 they probably would have ignored him. No coach would do that.

The coach hit the jackpot with two sets of twins this talented. However the coach also works harder than most college coaches. Along with very wealthy families that can send their kids for a month to altitude train in the summer and see sports psychologists. In contrast I was working 10 hour days of manual labor during the summer because my parents were lower middle class. Also my “sports psychologist” was my mom telling me to run faster.

Basically Newbury Park has themselves an obsessed college level coach. One with no kids of his own and a wife that is obsessed too. Personally I would rather have a normal life (children of my own and good paying career) than be obsessed with high school coaching glory. To each their own.

The abridged version to gauging how much of an outlier NP is- just take the z-score.

Theres a lot of factors wrote:

The coach hit the jackpot with two sets of twins this talented. However the coach also works harder than most college coaches. Along with very wealthy families that can send their kids for a month to altitude train in the summer and see sports psychologists. In contrast I was working 10 hour days of manual labor during the summer because my parents were lower middle class. Also my “sports psychologist” was my mom telling me to run faster.

Basically Newbury Park has themselves an obsessed college level coach. One with no kids of his own and a wife that is obsessed too. Personally I would rather have a normal life (children of my own and good paying career) than be obsessed with high school coaching glory. To each their own.

It’s one set of twins and one set of non-twin brothers.

Theres a lot of factors wrote:

The coach hit the jackpot with two sets of twins this talented. However the coach also works harder than most college coaches. Along with very wealthy families that can send their kids for a month to altitude train in the summer and see sports psychologists. In contrast I was working 10 hour days of manual labor during the summer because my parents were lower middle class. Also my “sports psychologist” was my mom telling me to run faster.

Basically Newbury Park has themselves an obsessed college level coach. One with no kids of his own and a wife that is obsessed too. Personally I would rather have a normal life (children of my own and good paying career) than be obsessed with high school coaching glory. To each their own.

Nonsense. His runners are comparable to German Fernandez because they have similar natural ability. All he has to do is not screw it up.

Once you let go of high mileage the doors can open.

There are no long races in HS.

A good 50-60/ week is all they need.

Given a willingness to work, whether or not you have <4:05 or < 8:40 kids has more to do w/ speed side capability.

This NP distance team has enough speed to run 4x800 < 7:35 and 4x400 < 3:30.

typically disagree wrote:

German's only underrated because he didn't chase the 2 mile record..

Who the hell has been underrating German? Oh right all the people on this thread that are surprised that Newbury''s whole team didn't crush his course record. Dummies.

4:01 mile[conversion] 8:37 2 mile [conversion] [ 2nd fastest ever run] double a few hours apart at age 17? No kid on that team will ever sniff that. If I'm wrong, Let's see it.

[ oh and yes of course the shoes absolutely gave them some significant seconds over what German was wearing. 20? And it was cooler conditions. Don't forget that when German ran that time he beat the entire state that day by 49 seconds! Yes no one else Broke 1510 that day. This is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong. Obviously better shoes and better weather made a lot of kids run a lot faster today then back then. Well, except faster than German ]

Since the spread seems to be getting hijacked how about Sarah Baxter's 16 flat at Mount sac that was quite impressive feet

Not everything is perfect at NBP. At the start of this xcross season I thought Cantù would be fifth runner based on his 4:17 1600 as a soph. He has not run well. I don’t know if he was injured or the pressure to make top 7 got to him.

So their coach doesn’t bring out the best in everyone.

It really does come down to the Sahlman’s and Young’s. The poster who stated this doesn’t come around but maybe every 100 years is so correct. All four have that rare gift of talent, hard work, speed and mental toughness.

I for one am glad to be witness to this once in a life time team.

Not much love for NPs Woodbridge records this year. How are these not mentioned in the same stratosphere as Ritz and German Fernandezs run? Yes, pancake flat course, but so was Ritzs run.

1. 11 Leo Young 13:38.1

Newbury Park

2. 11 Aaron Sahlman 13:42.3

Newbury Park

3. 11 Lex Young 13:44.4

Newbury Park

4. 12 Colin Sahlman 13:48.0

Newbury Park

How low can the Young twins and Aaron Salman take it next year? In ideal conditions extrapolating it out, can we see 1410s from the twins and 1420s for Aaron at Woodward next year? Crazy to think that's possible.