Saturday at the prestigious Briarwood Invitational agains the best in Pennsylvania and beyond. The varsity kicked things off with their best 1-5 gap of the season by far - just 68 seconds. Seniors Chris Berry and AJ Morgan led the way with a 17:18 and 17:43, respectively. Baylor Griffin followed with
his highest finish ever for the Bucks as the third man in 18:20.
Seniors Will Bone and Jimmie Kilgannon then closed out the scoring by closing hard over the last 1000 meters to clock 18:23 and 18:26. In a remarkably close team race, the Bucks finished 13th out of 25 teams with 275 points, but were just 50 points behind friendly rivals Pennridge (5th, 225 points) and CB East (7th, 240 points), and many of the top 12 teams. The Bucks narrowly defeated local rivals Hatboro-Horsham (14th, 277 points) as well as Council Rock South (16th, 330 points). Last week at the CB East Invitational, Council Rock South bested the Bucks by a score of 161 points to 170 points.
The JV A, not to be outdone, posted an outstanding 32 second 1-5 gap and a 34 second 1-6 gap!
Remarkably, Gray Wilson and Shawn Young ran 19:48.1 and 19:48.8, while Beckett Wilson (20:15.5), Trevor Belding (21:15.8), Anthony Soares (20:20), and Dean Woodrow (20:22) piled in just afterward.
Better still was the JV B, who had a 29 second 1-5 gap of their own! Austin Kline debuted his season with enthusiasm in 20:41, while Gillis Wang (20:54), Matt Bahner (21:07), Ryan Devlin (21:09), and Tyler Press (21:10) ran like a herd.
West's freshman put an exclamation point on the day in the 3k, placing three runners in the top seven - before all but four teams' first freshman had a chance to finish in a 30+ team field. Rock Fortna came out on top of an epic showdown with Cardinal O'Hara standout Rob Morro as the two shattered Coach Mahoney's fabled 9:47 course record. Fortna posted a 9:27.5 to show for his effort and earned a sizeable trophy and a nifty record. Brian Iatarola then placed 5th - just three seconds
shy of the old course record - in 9:50. Declan McDonald also pulled away from the field with gusto in 10:10, good for 7th place out of 192 finishers. Logan Mazullo (11:45) and Carter Zerweck (12:00) then charged in to close out the scoring for the young bucks. West's freshman placed 7th in a
close
team race out of the 21 teams that had enough runners to score with 177 points
(1st-6th: 121, 141, 148, 166, 169, 173).
The Bucks kick off their
dual meet season on Wednesday at 3:30pm at Central Bucks East for a tri-meet
with Pennridge and East.