For the coaches and members of the La Salle Academy boys’ cross-country team, their recent state title and win at Saturday’s New England Championship is just the beginning; just the beginning to bigger, and hopefully better, things in the next few weeks.
Along with Christian Brothers Academy (CBA) of New Jersey, the Rams will be one of the favored squads at the Nike Northeast Regionals, held at Bowdoin Park in New York on Nov. 29. The top two teams advance to Portland, Oregon for the Nike Cross-Country Nationals (NXN) a week later.
“There is no question we have the opportunity to finish in that top two and maybe win at Nike Northeast. But I don’t know. CBA is really, really good and the coach does a great job with that team,” said La Salle coach Ken Skelly, shortly after his Rams earned their second straight New England crown with a 67-144 win over runner-up Danbury. “I think we have a pretty good chance at getting a spot to Oregon but there is still a lot of work to be done. We’ll take a day to kind of recover and enjoy what happened today. After that, we’ll get back to work. That’s it.”
“That’s kind of been the main goal all the time,” said sophomore D.J. Principe. “We really want to try and get over there and take it to some of those teams and try and come out with the win.”
La Salle beat a strong field at the NE meet, one that featured Connecticut’s 1-2 finishers at its state meet, Danbury and Ridgefield. Ridgefield, the runner-up at last year’s New England’s, placed third on Saturday with 145 points.
Sophomore D.J. Principe was the top finisher for the Rams, taking sixth overall in 15 minutes, 56 seconds. Junior teammate Matt Bouthillette was 17th at 16:15. Comprising the remainder of the scoring was senior Dan Paiva (25th, 16:22), junior Jake Grundy (29th, 16:26) and junior Jack Salisbury (32nd, 16:27). The Rams averaged a time of 16:17 by its five scoring runners, their slowest of the last three championship meets (class, state and New England).
“It definitely wasn’t our best race in sense of time but that’s what championships are all about,” Skelly said. “It’s all about doing your job and making sure you get the placements that you need to bring in the best score possible. We were up against a real tough Ridgefield and Danbury team from Connecticut and Hendricken (fifth, 191 points) from Rhode Island. It was all hands on deck today and I think they did a very good job of that pack mentality and keeping it close. I would like to see it move up just a little bit more but that’s championship races. You can’t always get what you want. You got to be happy with everything that you do.”
Skelly and his assistant coaches Bill Myers and Mark Mercurio were situated at various points of the course. The Rams were consistent from the opening gun.
“We did a pretty good job of covering the course. I was able to see them at the very start. I saw that we got a good start. That was a little promising,” Skelly said. “Some of the guys were a little fast. I saw them again at two miles. They started to come alive at that point. They were a little back there but they did a pretty good job of locking up that last half mile. I think everybody passed at least one or two kids or more. We grabbed some points that last half mile.”
The main focus for the Rams was coming out with the ‘W’.
“We won last year and we wanted to come back and defend it again,” said Principe, a seventh-place finisher at the 2013 meet. “Everything went well. Everyone wasn’t feeling their best. It was a good experience. Everyone toughed it out and really came in well.”
“We came in looking to win,” Bouthillette added. “We were in a tough race. It wasn’t our best race but we came out with the win, which was good.”
La Salle will have a little more than two weeks to prepare for the Nike Northeast meet at Wappinger Falls. In last year’s meet, the Rams finished eighth overall. CBA, their chief rival this year, won the team title and later would place second at the nationals.
“We are going to go in with an open mind and run tough,” Bouthillette said. “There’s a lot of good teams coming out of the northeast. We are just going to run our hardest and hopefully come out with the win.”
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A total of 264 runners and 30 teams competed in the boys’ race at the New England Championship. Junior Dominic Parlato was the top runner for Hendricken, finishing 24th overall in 16:20. East Greenwich, a ninth-place finisher in the meet, was led by Noah Barreto (62nd) and Joe Higgins (63rd). Both were timed in 16:52. Cumberland’s Sean Laverty, a junior, was 34th overall in 16:28. As a team, the Clippers placed 15th.