Winning the PIAA State Championship last year, the boys’ cross country team has prepared themselves for another exciting year. As they outran their competitors during their home meet on September 19th against Central Bucks South and Souderton, the team finished with 18-43 and 18-45 victories, respectively. They are still training and working hard to achieve what the runners from last year accomplished.
“It is definitely stressful trying to do as well, if not better, than last year. We have a lot of expectations…It’s really tough to repeat, but we definitely have a shot to do what we did last year,” said Jack Macauley, the North Penn runner who finished in first place on Wednesday’s meet with a time of 16:02.
Although it is an outstanding time, he has had a record of 15:58 showing his determination to work harder and to push himself in order to keep his time constant.
The Boys’ cross country team has excelled in every meet, but they will not conform themselves with just being good. They have high goals, but in order to achieve them, they have to improve their times for the upcoming meets.
“We cannot have the gaps in between each one. We all have to get a lot closer to each other… We have to focus on ourselves, not really on the other teams,” said Macauley.
“Times looked to be a lot better than they have been the past couple weeks and it is this time of the year that
we just start to get into speed training. That is when the times tend to drop” says cross country Coach Michael
Werner.
Along with the team’s training, there is also added pressure to win the state Championship this year. “We’ve been improving slowly, I mean we lost some good guys last year. We have a lot of new guys on the team but we also have a lot of returning runners, and we develop as we go through the season and we really look to focus at the end of October and the beginning of November,” said Coach Werner.
Without the seniors who graduated last year, the team has to prepare all the runners, whether new or returning, so, by November, they will be prepared and ready for the Championship.
“The way the season ended last year was phenomenal. It was a great year! It gives us confidence that we can run well at Hershey, but until we put in the work to make up for the guys that we lost last year, and until we decide to work as hard as our competitors are, it does not matter,” explained Coach Werner.