The Inside Track
Sunday August 31, 2008
Sunday August 31, 2008: Ekiden Meet (9/6): The team is preparing for the season’s first meet…the Ekiden, to be held at the Iroquois Middle School in Niskayuna. Relay teams will have five runners and each will race the same distance. Each frosh team member will run a leg of 1000M (.63 miles) and the Varsity and JV runners will each run a leg of 1.55 miles. The course layout is now available on the meet’s website.
Alumni Update: Some of the top runners from the last two Shaker XC teams may compete against each other on September 13th in the Fairfield Invitational in Conneticut. Matt Bogdan (’07), a sophomore at Yale and is expected to run. Also entered that day is the UAlbany XC team that includes three members of the Shaker Class of 2008: RJ Sniffen, Chris Manico and Devon Sedgwick. Steve Marthy (‘06) will be competing this year on the Army Cross Country team that has been picked third in the preseason Patriot League poll. The first home meet for Army will be held at West Point on September 12th. Brian Benson (’07) and Matt Dodge (’07) will be running in their second season at Stonehill College which has been ranked #2 in the Division II Men’s East Regional preseason Cross Country poll. You are welcome to submit info on any other Shaker alumni who are running for a college team.
Help Wanted: If you have photos of Shaker runners in a 2008 Cross Country meet, you can submit them to bhickey@shakerunning.com for possible publication on www.shakerrunning.com
Soph Races: With a solid group of 10th graders moving up from last year’s powerful Frosh team, Coach Springstead has more choices for entries in some of the big invitational meets like the Suffern Invy (9/20) and the Manhattan meet (10/11). There is both a Soph race and a JV race in each of those meets, so Coach will have the choice of picking whichever he thinks is best for the team.
Top Runners will need to choose: The 2008 Foot Locker Northeast Regional (at Van Cortlandt Park) and the Nike NXN New York Regional Meet (at Bowdoin Park) are both scheduled for the same day… Saturday, November 29th. FL has always qualified only individual runners (top 10 from each of the four regions) for the FL Cross Country Championship. Before this year, Nike has only qualified the top two teams in each of nine regions (plus four at large teams) for the Nike Team Championship. This year, Nike has expanded the competition to also allow the top five individual runners (from each of the nine regions), not on a qualifying team, to also move on to the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN). In some cases, this may create a difficult decision for a top individual runner because he or she will need to choose the best race for them.
