The Walter Johnson boys team won the Spiked Shoe Invitational varsity boys race with 70 points. Five WJ runners finished in the top 21 with a 42 second top-five spread between 17:04 and 17:46. This came after a nearly perfect score of 16 in the open race, a winning score of 43 in the JV race, and a lengthy delay where all varsity boys were called off the start line for about 20 minutes.

WJ Coach Tom Martin said that his boys raced hard but they have a lot of work to do.

"We don't have a stud front runner. We want to run like a pack team and move that pack up throughout the year. We want to get all seven boys up to the front of the race."

The team's top 3200m runner, Will Delay, was absent. Nathaniel Rees was running with the WJ top five for most of the race until he took a bad fall and finished outside of 20 minutes.

Good Counsel's Collin Crilly spent most of the race in third place behind Linganore's Patrick DuBoyce and Loyola's Tyler Spear. Crilly was able to move into second place in the second half of the race, but he could not close down Duboyce's lead.

Said Crilly, "I don't like to go out in front so I just wanted to keep him in striking distance."

He finished ten seconds behind DuBoyce with a time of 16:25.

On trying to chase down DuBoyce in the heat, he added, "That was tough."

The temperature rose to the upper 80's with high humidity by the final race at noon. The course itself posed several challenges with numerous turns and several short steep hills.

Good Counsel sophomore Taylor Kozam attacked the course in the girls varsity race, though according to Coach Tom Arnold, she probably did not know the competition that she was up against. Ellie Gonzalez and Hannah Mansbach broke away from the field to run a race of their own while Kozam led the chase pack.

Kozam finished third in 20:30, a full minute behind Gonzalez (19:21) and Mansbach (19:29). According to Arnold, Kozam is behind where she was this time last year. She broke 20:00 in her first varsity race last year as a freshman and ran 19:00 at the Great American XC Festival. We can expect Kozam's times to improve from here since prior to August, she had not worked out with the team since the previous cross country season.

Holy Cross took third place in the varsity girls race ahead of WCAC rival Good Counsel. Holy Cross is greatly improved this year with two freshmen at around 22:00 complimenting last year's duo of Kiernan Keller and Katie Toner.