By Mary McCabe — Sports Contributor
The Concord-Carlisle High School boys cross country team won the MIAA Division 1B State Championship meet on November 9, racing on a challenging course at Northfield Mountain in near-perfect weather.
Sawyer Bout (11th) and Luke Crounse (14th) each earned top-15 medals, with Brendan Quinn finishing 17th. Charlie MacDonald, Cam Smack, Joey Bodenrader, and Jay Bodenrader rounded out the CCHS top seven.
The race wasn’t without complications for the Patriots. Twenty minutes before the gun went off, Brady Quayle ceded his spot to Jay Bodenrader because of a knee problem.
Packs win championship races, and Concord-Carlisle’s was together from the start. More important, the top six were no more than six seconds apart at the mile mark.
When the unofficial results were posted, it appeared the Patriots had finished second, 28 points behind Natick. While reviewing the results, one official found that Bout’s 11th-place finish had not been recorded. The correction put CCHS ahead of Natick by three points.
Meet of Champions
The Patriots finished fourth at the Meet of Champions on November 16, racing in a field that included the top-ranked teams in Massachusetts: Boston College High, Brookline, Amherst, Lexington, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, Newton South, and Arlington.
Twenty-three teams competed, along with 30 individual qualifiers. Last year, Concord only had two individual qualifiers race in the meet, having finished one point out of the qualifying round.
The CCHS team of Bout, MacDonald, Bodenrader, Quinn, Crounse, Quayle, and Smack beat all the Division 1 DCL teams, including DCL champion Newton South.
MacDonald, the only team member to have raced at this meet last year, ran a personal best for the Fort Devens 5K course, closing in the final mile and finishing one second behind Bout.
Bodenrader arguably ran his best race of the season. Crounse struggled as he headed toward the 2-mile mark but turned it around on the steep and dusty hill, making gains over the last mile.
Quinn passed as many as 10 people in the final 100 meters. Smack was the third ninth grader to finish in a highly competitive field. And sophomore Quayle ran a great race just off CC’s pack of five.
CC’S top five runners finished only 21 seconds apart — the lowest spread of any team across all three divisions.
