TEAM TUESDAY

On Tuesdays, we are going to highlight teams that had good performances on the weekend and who are trending up in the season.

Over the weekend, we saw several meets where teams ran in big meets and had big team performances. We will highlight some of many that are worth mentioning.

Denton 

Denton High School returns for the 2021 cross country season after two straight positive seasons. They have been chasing a team championship and last year they were a step closer as they finished the year on the podium in Round Rock.

They were runners-up to Grapevine at the Region 1-5A championships and then they were third at the UIL 5A state meet behind Grapevine and Boerne Champion. As a team at state, they ran a 16:05 team average with a 1:07 1-5 runner split.

Saturday, they showed they are ready to press things a little bit further and challenge the defending state champs. The Denton boys ran a 15:57.14 team average with a 1:22 split with an interesting plot for the team.

Their returning top runner Wyatt Athey who was 4th at the region last year and 16th at the state meet was their number three finisher on the team this weekend even though he ran 15:36.97. That shows how big Drew McLaughlin (15:20.33) and Matthew Norton (15:33.73) were in Southlake and how ready the Denton boys are for the 2021 cross country season.

Southlake Carroll

This is the youngest boys team to come through Carroll in a while. The possibility of having no seniors in the top 7 will be a first in a a while for the program.

Youth is always a good thing and being young and fast should bode well for them in the future, but the present will bring some learning experiences this year. That makes the Dragons a team to watch for later in the season.

Don't let all of this talk cause the confusion that Carroll doesn't feel they have a chance to win it all this year. At their own meet, they ran a 15:53.27 team average with a minuscule 27.38 second 1-5 split. I know it's a different course, but it's also a different time in the season, but this weekend they ran even faster than their 15:56.team average and a 41 second split for last November when they won their second straight UIL 6A championship.

Only Hunter Hill who was Carroll's number one runner over the weekend and Logan Cantu who was their number six runner Saturday were on last year's state championship winning roster. Don't be surprised to see Southlake Carroll at the top of the podium in November.

El Paso Eastwood

The boys in El Paso went berserk last weekend by dropping some fast individual times. If you overlook the team stats then you're making a mistake.

Eastwood had a fantastic meet at the Rudy Alvarez Del Valle Inv., the Troopers had a 15:46.08 team average and a 47.66 split. Like Southlake Carroll, they rolled out a mostly new squad from last year due to graduation, but an even faster outcome than their runner-up UIL 6A state meet performance.

On Saturday, they bettered their 15:59 average and 50 second split from last November and they did this with just their five, six, and seven runners from last year.

Andres Gurrola, Isaac Mendoza, and Victor Anchondo are the three from last year's state meet team and they were big contributors last weekend. Gurrola, Mendoza, and Devon Paez helped carry Eastwood as they all ran under 15:40.

Boys 5,000m Team Rankings