Looking Past Norwood

There's a truism in sports: never look past your current opponent, no matter how much the odds favor you. The underdog can always come up with a few big plays, hang around, and then pull off the big upset.

Sorry, not today. Both the boys and girls teams are looking past Norwood. They can't help it. There are bigger meets on the horizon. For the girls, the McIntyre Bay State Invitations is on Saturday and it promises to be an exciting debut for North's "fab five" -- a phalanx of talented ninth-graders who hope to strut their stuff in the freshmen 3K. For the boys, its the prospect of a big meet against Wellesley (and Walpole) October 5th.

There are reasons to look past a meet with a weak opponent. One reason is that it allows you to get more training in. Runners don't like resting too much unless they need to produce a top performance. A meet against Norwood doesn't require a top performance, so most runners would rather devote the day (and the day before) to hard training.

Some might say that this is a sign of disrespect to the other team. I would disagree. Neither team harbors the illusion that a bunch of Norwood kids who have never broken 19 minutes for 5K will suddenly and without warning cut two minutes off their times. It's not like football, where with the right combination of breaks, a weaker opponent can hold on against a stronger one. In running, there is very little luck. So you can run your best (and it is honorable to do so), but you aren't going to beat a much better team unless their top five runners go off-course and get disqualified. (Actually, three years ago at Norwood, the top five runners from Newton North went off course and were disqualified. Even without their top five, North easily beat the Mustangs.)

It might sound like I think the meet is a waste of time. Not at all! For one thing, the disparity in ability only applies to the top ten runners or so. For all the others, boys and girls, the race is a great opportunity to compare times from previous weeks and note progress. There will be some great racing in the middle of the pack, and that's always worth seeing.

And one of these years Norwood will get a couple of good runners, and they'll catch the running bug. They'll talk a few of their friends into running. And then a couple of soccer players will make the switch to cross-country. And then they'll figure out that the key to XC success is to train through the summer, and all of a sudden Norwood will be very good, very dangerous, and the no one will be looking past Norwood, but rather circling the date of the meet on their calendars. Now THAT's a realistic scenario. But Newton North losing today is not.