Girls Class A Teams
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State of the Action: For three weeks in a row, Saratoga has had a championship-style meet. Suburbans to Sectionals to States. And each of those three times, they have raised the bar once again, topping what many already thought was a Nation-leading performance at Suburbans. They put all 5 (make that 6) girls in the Top 10, even in the merge, where no other team was able to get more than two. They bettered the 5-man average Course Record by 6 seconds over Fayetteville-Manlius from 2016, a team that went on to win NXN.
Not only did they run well, they ran well despite variability. Their lead girl for both 2019 and 2020, two US #1 squads, was their 5th girl at Chenango with her 4th best Speed Rating ever. Their number one from Sectionals, came in as their 3rd girl. Emily Bush, their number 1, ran four points higher than her career best to lead the squad to victory. Even more so, pull out their Top 2 runners, and they would tie the second place team in scoring, without another runner for the fifth man tie-breaker. It was an impressive performance top-to-bottom.
And what about that second place performance? Defending State Champs Fayetteville-Manlius ran their best race of the season, and that may have been able to get them to think about a podium finish if NXN was an option, but they were still twenty points back. They still haven't finished lower than 2nd in nearly 20 years at States, but it would be hard to catch the 30-second compression of Saratoga.
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