By BUDDY HURLOCK

Staff reporter

10/04/2001

One good runner does not a good cross country team make. Not two or three, even. "Everybody in the top seven has a potentially equal part in the outcome," said Joe O'Neill, in his 33rd season of coaching cross country at St. Mark's High.

"The first runner doesn't have any more responsibility, and the fifth runner is probably the most crucial. How good they are is key to how good your team is," O'Neill said.

Cross county meets are scored by awarding points based on the positions that runners finish. First place equals one point, second place is two points, and so on. The lowest score wins.

Only a team's top five runners can score, but its sixth and seventh runners do play a role. If runner No. 6 and 7 finish ahead of an opponent's first five, it worsens the opponent's score.

Consider this example: Team A has the first two finishers, but places 1-2-6-8-12. Team B finishes 3-4-5-7-9, with runners also 10th and 11th. That pushes Team A's fifth runner to 12th. That ensured Team B's 28-29 win. It's the product of pack running. Teammates stick together to ensure score together. Ties are possible. The St. Mark's girls has had 28-28 meets against Middletown and Padua this year. The win is then decided on where a team's sixth runner finished. St. Mark's won that way against Middletown, but lost to Padua.

Spartans senior Nora Miller knows the importance of being her team's fifth runner. "The others rely on me just as much as I rely on them," she said. "It's a lot of pressure, but when you're out there on that cross country course, you're not thinking you are No. 1 right now or that you have four girls in front of you, and need to beat them. "It's not like that. You just go out there and run your hardest and that's the best that you can do," Miller said. Depth becomes more crucial at invitationals and the state championship meet, where it's dozens of teams and hundreds of runners. A fifth runner finishing further back in the standings could cost a team 30 or 50 points. "You can win a dual meet with three good runners," O'Neill said. "But you can't win an invitational with three good runners. Your fifth runner has to be close. It's the whole basis of the sport, in my mind."

Last weekend, Salesianum School won the large-schools race at the Bulldog Invitational near Media, Pa., finishing ahead of Cardinal O'Hara (Pa.) 73-80. O'Hara had three boys in the top 10. But Sallies' seventh runner finished before O'Hara's fifth did.

"It's the contradiction of cross country," said Ralph Heiss, in his 13th season at Sallies. "There are individual efforts, but it's really a team effort."