Let’s talk northwest xc

Northwest will be interesting. Jesuit, Crater and Rocky Mt look to be the top 3 right now. Jesuit hasn’t run a full lineup yet, Crater ran well at Woodbridge, but hard to compare that to any real XC course, Rocky Mt has 5 boys sub 16 which is legit on Idaho courses (little bit of altitude and variety or grass, hills, gravel, etc.). Will be fun to see what teams are in the mix by the time that second weekend in November rolls around. What has everyone seen for the girls top Northwest teams so far?

Jesuit ran a full squad in Seattle last night. Times good for there second race, and first race with there full A squad racing. Definitely a gap between 4 and 5. I would look for this gap to get smaller and smaller as the season progresses and as the 5 and 6 man get more racing experience under there belts. Schumaker does not look to be running anytime soon. My money is still on Jesuit out of the PNW. They are only going to get faster and stronger as this was there 2 race in comparison to other teams going on races 5 or 6 in some cases. They race again next week at Hole in the Wall where they will see Eastlake again and Bishop Blanchet who still are missing there top guys.

Jesuit doesn’t seem to need Schumacher. He probably wouldn’t even make varsity at this point this year. Their 7th (junior) is actually with their 6th too.

will Schumacher now go to school close to where he lives?

intersting fact: senior Firth is the 8th man for Jesuit for the second year in a row (without Schumacher). Shows how much depth through 7 they found to start the season.

Can we talk about how bad Blanchet has been this year? Obviously having your top two runners out for stress fractures is going to have an impact. Oliver (also coming off a stress fracture) should have been a solid third, but has failed to come even close to his prior form. Others have underwhelmed. Maybe the coach ran his guys into the ground when he saw the possibility of a trip to NXN?

Blanchet would have been like #5 in WA if Schneider and Recupero had the fastest times.

I have zero knowledge about their coaching but they are probably burning those kids out too much.

I remember reading somewhere that Rocky Mountain is a well coached team

2 of the Jesuit new varsity runners (Strub and Strong) are about a minute faster than they were last year.

Since this region is still competitive with Crater and Rocky Mountain in it, Jesuit will need to develop a 5th to have better chances of making it out of this region. Same goes to Eastlake.

Jesuit has 3 people at the 5-6-7 position that can pull that off. All 3 seem to be at the same level now

Eastlake seems to have only 1

In case you guys haven’t seen Rocky Mountain results from this weekend
https://id.milesplit.com/meets/498006-inland-empire-championships-2022/teams/21185#.YzpBxSVOkWM
14:48
14:51
15:28
15:34
Missing Keith U - 15:51 PR. Probably up there with the 15:28/15:34 guys

That course is probably the fastest course any of those kids will run on if they don’t go to Runninglane or woodbridge.

Regardless, the team is looking strong through 5.

Do you guys think that the Northwest region will have 2 at-large berths this year?

Crater, Rocky Mountain, Jesuit and Eastlake all look really good but they all need to run well at NXR.

Jesuit, Eastlake, etc will need to bury the non-NW teams that are coming to Hole in the Wall on Saturday in order to bolster the argument for 2 at-larges.

Torrey Pines CA placed 11th at Woodbridge, and Cheyenne Mountain CO placed 4th at Liberty Bell. Neither of these teams look like strong threats to make it to NXN, but they both come from extremely strong regions in their own right.

Or Hole in the Wall

Rocky is the strongest team in the NW no doubt

Schneider may be on the bike right now, but we have this:

Entries list for hole in the wall

athletic.net

Track & Field, Cross Country Results, Statistics

Meet results and team scores.

Link:www.athletic.net/CrossCountry/meet/206...

Blanchet is in the different race. Looks like Recupero will be opening up his season

athletic.net

Track & Field, Cross Country Results, Statistics

Meet results and team scores.

Link:www.athletic.net/CrossCountry/meet/206...

Cheyenne mountain co is entered in the same race as Jesuit OR.

Not as good as last year but they are still deep and some guys stepped up. They still have Leavings (the only guy still on the team who was on varsity last year), and 4 other guys who ran a sub-16 this year. In fact one of the guys who is a soph right now ran in the 21s last year first race, ended that season in the 18s, and this year he ran a 15:59. He had an older brother on varsity who graduated last year. That must have been helpful.

Anyways it should be a rematch between Jesuit and Cheyenne mountain from RunningLane. If Jesuit can close the 4-5 gap, they will be better than last year’s Cheyenne mountain team. These 2 teams weren’t that far apart from each other at RunningLane

Super happy for the kid. He was a youth runner star and made the transition to HS elite pretty well. I don’t think his injury woes indicate fragility on his part given that the two next best runners on his team also got stress fractures at the same time. Coach needs to do some hard reassessing of his approach the last 12+ months. Scheider will do well with Powell.

Anyone surprised that Eastlake is not even in the Honorable mention here?

these rankings were done after they raced jesuit. yes Jesuit beat them but that was only by 11 pts