New course record today at Westmoor Ram Invitational

Live Oak junior Kaylah Grant (photo on the right courtesy of Dan Bingham) finished the 1st Varsity girls race in 14:00 which broke the previous course record of Cate Ratliff at 14:03 in 2014. Jennifer Akana of Lowell held the record before Ratliff at 14:05 in 1996. Shannon Rowbury of Sacred Heart Cathedral ran 14:14 as a senior in 2001 (confirmed by her HS coach, Andy Chan).

Results will be posted when I get them. In the meantime, feel free to comment below on any of the races today.

Pacific Tigers High School Invitational Results LINK (NEW)

McCandless Powers No. 5 MIT to Runner-Up Finish at Williams

http://www.mitathletics.com/sports/w-xc/2016-17/releases/20160925cgbcar (Granada HS 2016 grad, Megan McCandless)

If you have other Northern California alumni rolling in college, please send the information my way and I can share with everybody here.

Also, from the Lou Vasquez Invitational at Golden Gate Park on Thursday, September 22nd, check out all the alumni that competed at that event. Results at this LINK.

2016 North Coast Section Rankings (1st Edition)

My first attempt at the North Coast Section Team rankings is posted below. Things will become much clearer after the Stanford Invitational but what the heck, here you go sports fans. If you have any thoughts on any of the divisions, let's hear them in the comment section below. If I completely whiffed on a team in any of the divisions, please let me know.

Division I

Girls - (Top 2 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Castro Valley

2.    Dougherty Valley

3.    Berkeley

4.    California

5.    James Logan

Boys - (Top 2 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Dougherty Valley

2.    Berkeley

3.    James Logan

4.    Castro Valley

5.    California

Division II (UPDATED)

Girls - (Top 3 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Granada

2.    San Ramon Valley
3.    Monte Vista

4.    Amador Valley
5.    Liberty

Boys - (Top 3 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Monte Vista
2.    Granada

3.    Dublin

4.    De La Salle

5.    Amador Valley
6.    Clayton Valley

Division III

Girls - (Top 4 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Maria Carrillo

2.    Redwood

3.    Campolindo

4.    Las Lomas

5.    Alameda/El Cerrito 

Boys - (Top 4 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Redwood

2.    Campolindo

3.    Maria Carrillo

4.    Las Lomas

5.    Northgate

Division IV

Girls - (Top 4 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Piedmont
2.    Bishop O'Dowd

3.    Miramonte

4.    Arcata

5.    McKinleyville

Boys - (Top 3 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Bishop O'Dowd

2.    McKinleyville

3.    Sir Francis Drake

4.    Miramonte

5.    Piedmont

Division V (UPDATED)

Girls - (Top 6 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Sonoma Academy

2.    Lick-Wilmerding

3.    College Prep

4.    St. Joseph Notre Dame

5.    University

6.    Branson

Boys - (Top 5 teams advance to state meet):

1.    Lick-Wilmerding

2.    College Prep
3.    Sonoma Academy

4.    University

5.    St. Joseph Notre Dame

6.    Marin Academy/Head Royce

Northern California League Results

Coaches, the toughest results to track down are league meet results. After completing your league meets, please send me your results to albertjcaruana@gmail.com. 

I am working on locating the BCL West results from yesterday. I will post them as soon as I find them. If you have other league meets that you want to share, please email them to me or post link below.

MBL #1 (Gabilan) results at this LINK. NEW

9/21 BCL West Group 2 results at this LINK. NEW

9/21 Redwood Empire meets found at this LINK. NEW

BCL East Results from today at Coyote Hills (2.48 miles)
http://www.rtspt.com/events/cif/2016Meets/bcl/92016/ (Cooper Teare and Emily Perez of St. Joseph Notre Dame take the individual victories while College Prep takes both team battles.)

Others?

2016 Westmoor HS Ram Invitational Meet Preview

You can check out the meet preview at this LINK. I found the meet record for the boys which is 12:04 by Eric Chavez of St. Francis from 1999. Does anybody know what the girls' record is for the Westmoor HS course?

DO NOT WASTE GOOD TIME – MY REFLECTIONS ON SARAH SUMPTER, BY CHRIS PUPPIONE

Today is the one year anniversary of the passing of former Healdsburg HS and UC Davis runner Sarah Sumpter. She fought courageously against an eating disorder and brain cancer and in her brief life, she left quite an imprint on a lot of people. Among them was the coach who recruited her to UC Davis, Chris Puppione, who penned this poignant post after her unfortunate passing.

This BLOG POST was posted today by former Saugus runner Brandon Jauregui who also had his own battle with cancer and was inspired by Sarah's grit and determination.

Clovis Invitational Start Lists

Check out which NorCal teams will be duking it out against some of the best individuals and teams in California. You can find the complete lists of races and teams at this LINK.

Former Arroyo HS runner Yong-Sung Leal in the news for being a hero

An update on this story. The potential kidnapper has been captured in another state. A welcome conclusion to this episode all thanks to the brave response of Yong-Sung Leal. I know a lot of people really respected Leal for his accomplishments on the cross country trials and track but that respect went up immensely for me. Great dude.

Leal is one of the legendary runners in NCS. He had a best of 8:57.88 as a senior when that time was considered REALLY FAST. He also ran 9:00.49 as a sophomore. In cross country, Leal was a 2 time state champion as a sophomore and junior in 2000 and 2001. He still holds the Division II NCS record on the Hayward HS course with his 14:38 from 2001 when the course was not expertly pampered by Peter Brewer. If he wasn't considered enough of a badass already, Leal now makes the news by saving a woman from being kidnapped.

You can check out the newspaper article at this LINK.

Darting here and there...

Off the top of my head, here we go.

North Coast Section changes
Lots of changes this year in North Coast Section especially at the section level with many teams dropping down to a different division this year. It will be very interesting to see how it all plays out and in the next couple of weeks, I will post the first in-season rankings to see what the divisions look like at this point. If this is all new to you, here are the divisions for this season which you can check out at this LINK. The other changes are that several schools changed leagues such as St. Joseph Notre Dame moving to BCL East, Dublin moving to EBAL and College Park, Clayton Valley and Northgate moving to DAL (there are other teams that moved as well). You can check out all the leagues on the NCS site at this LINK.

Central Coast Section course site
Toro Park is scheduled to be the site of the CCS meet this year since this is an even numbered year. Due to the Sobranes fires, Toro Park has been used as a staging area for fire fighters and at this point, the park is still closed. It's still unclear about when the park will be open which means the location of the CCS meet is still at Toro Park at this point but it is still possible that there might be the need for a change of location.

Sac-Joaquin Section Rankings
Now that the SJS has released the divisions for the 2016 season, I can begin ranking each division in the section. I will need to do some research and reach out to coaches out there but the plan is for the first edition of the SJS rankings to be posted before next week. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss any of the individual and team state contenders as we have had to see most of them compete.

Newspaper links and videos
In the past, I have posted links to newspaper articles as well as videos. I still do but in order not to overcrowd the front page, you will now find most of those links and videos on my twitter account at https://twitter.com/CCExpress, instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/albertjcaruana/ and Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/crosscountryexpress/. To help increase the audience to those social media sites, please follow, like, tag etc. You will not be disappointed.

MilesplitCA
For the past two years, I have also been contributing to ca.milesplit.com which I have enjoyed reaching out to a larger part of the state. For those of you that don't know, MileSplit was started by a Florida runner named Jason Byrne when he was 19 years old. The site grew from the sunshine state and expanded to the entire nation. You can read a bit more about Jason at this LINK. Jason sold MileSplit to Flosports 3 years ago and at this point, there are 150 people that work for Milesplit. If you have ever wondered why our two sports (Cross Country & Track and Field) continue to grow at such a rapid rate and why times continue to drop, look no further than what sites like Milesplit have done to help promote our sport and amazing athletes. Aside from ca.milesplit.com, check out the national site at www.milesplit.com. You can also follow on twitter at https://twitter.com/milesplitca, instagram at https://www.instagram.com/milesplitca/ and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MilesplitCA/.

Reaching Out to Me
While I do post daily on this site, there are definitely days when I am looking for material to post. If you have links, videos, newspaper articles, tips etc that you feel should be shared with everybody, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at albertjcaruana@gmail.com. A lot of what I post on the site has been relayed to me by athletes, coaches and parents. 

If you have anything to add such as any thoughts about the start of this season, please feel free to comment below. 

De La Salle/Carondelet Nike XC Invitational Varsity Boys race video

Thanks to Jesuit coach, Walt Lange