Florida Boys Top 10: Mantecon Leads, and a Name Nobody Ranked Sits Fourth

Florida boys cross country, after opening weekend: August 21-22, 2026

Ranking runners in August is mostly guesswork. Ranking them in August in Florida, after a weekend where the heat index touched 107, is worse than guesswork unless you account for where each race was run.

So we did. Forty boys ran both the 2025 state meet and the Jim Ryun FCA Invitational at Holloway Park in Lakeland. Throw out the top and bottom of that group, the kids who blew up and the kids who had the race of their lives, and the ones left in the middle were 38.2 seconds slower at Holloway than they were at the state course. Run the same math against Cecil Field, where 162 returners raced, and the offset is essentially zero. Holloway is simply a slow place to run. Cecil is not.

That single number reorders this list. A 15:54 at Holloway and a 15:54 at Cecil Field are not the same race, and pretending otherwise is how preseason rankings get embarrassed in November.

What follows is built on the 2025 state meet with seniors stripped out, every school re-slotted into its finalized 2026-27 classification, and one weekend of August evidence layered on top. If you want the full account of how that weekend went, we wrote it up here: the best runner in Florida didn't race, and Belen Jesuit won anyway.

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1. Marcelo Mantecon, Belen Jesuit, Sr., 3A

He didn't race, and it doesn't matter.

Mantecon ran 15:05.6 for fourth at Nike Cross Nationals last December as a Southeast at-large individual, was runner-up at the Brooks national championship, won his second straight 3A title by 9.4 seconds, and put 14:33 on the board at the New World Spectacular. Gatorade named him Florida's Boys Cross Country Player of the Year. He won eight of eleven races as a junior.

Nobody else in this state has a resume within shouting distance, and the argument that he is the best returning boy in the country is a serious one. An August DNS does not move a runner who was fourth in America nine months ago.

2. Armando Cruz, Belen Jesuit, Sr., 3A

Cruz ran the opener his teammate skipped, and he handled it: 15:06 at Cecil Field, through the mile in roughly 4:42, gone just past 10:27. That is 6.7 seconds faster than the 15:12.7 he ran at state, and doing it in that air is worth more than the clock says.

The top two returning boys in Florida share a locker room. That is the single most important fact in 3A, and Belen made it worse on Friday by running Jack Michalak 15:47 and Liam Salom 15:54 behind him. Three boys under 15:55 with the national-class one at home.

3. Quentin Thompson, Lake Minneola, Sr., 4A

The biggest jump by any ranked returner in Florida this weekend, and it is not close.

Thompson ran 16:29.6 at state last fall, which put him 47th on our returner list. He ran 15:16 for second at Cecil Field. That is a drop of 1:13.6, with no course adjustment and no heat allowance involved, because Cecil needs neither. He simply got a lot better over one summer, and Lake Minneola, already our projected third team in 4A, got better with him.

4. Jaxon Kiper, Strawberry Crest, Sr.

The name that appears in no preseason ranking anywhere, including ours, because he has no 2025 state finish on record. Strawberry Crest sent nobody to Tallahassee.

Kiper won the Jim Ryun Invitational in 15:54.3, by 23.2 seconds, out of a 252-runner varsity field. On raw time that makes him the twelfth-fastest Floridian of the weekend, which is where a lazy list would put him. Apply the Holloway offset and it becomes a 15:16 Cecil-equivalent, dead even with Thompson and four seconds up on Howdeshell.

One of those two readings is right. We built the offset off forty runners who ran both courses, so we are taking the course into account. If Kiper shows up at a fast meet in October and runs 16:10, we were wrong and we will say so.

5. Isaiah Howdeshell, Largo, Sr., 3A

Third at Cecil Field in 15:20, 41.2 seconds faster than his state run.

The reclassification matters as much as the time. Largo moves from 4A to 3A for 2026-27, which drops Howdeshell into the same postseason bracket as both Belen Jesuit runners. He was our ninth-ranked returner going in. He is comfortably better than that now, and he has picked the hardest possible year to be third-best in his own class.

6. Axel Sallault, East Ridge, Sr., 4A

Sallault owns the third-fastest returning state time in Florida at 15:27.5, behind only the two Belen seniors, and he gets the benefit of the doubt for one flat August evening.

He ran 15:47 at Cecil for eighth, 19.5 seconds off his own state mark, in a race where several top returners obviously treated the date as what it was. The November version of Sallault ranks higher than sixth. We are not going to pretend one opener rewrote a 15:27.

7. Will Moss, Montverde Academy, Sr., 2A

Did not open. Moss ran 15:35.3 at state, fourth-fastest among all returning boys, and he is the clear favorite in 2A whenever he decides to show up.

He is ranked here on last fall's evidence, which is exactly what a preseason list is for. He is also the runner on this list most likely to move up sharply the first time he pins on a number.

8. Rishi Chopra, Nease, Sr., 4A

Fourth at Cecil in 15:39, a 37.7-second improvement, and the front end of a Nease team that finished second to Belen on Friday and projects second in 4A.

Teammate Matthew Ishee ran 15:54 the same night, 25.7 seconds up. Whatever Nease did this summer worked on more than one guy, which is the difference between a good runner and a team that travels to Tallahassee.

9. Jonathan Kiros, Chiles, Sr., 3A

The most consistent runner on this list, for better and for worse.

Kiros ran 15:46.3 at state and 15:47 at Cecil, seven-tenths apart. He went with Cruz through the mile and hung on for ninth when the pace turned. In a 3A field that now contains Mantecon, Cruz, Howdeshell and Michalak, 15:46 is a hard way to make a podium. It is also a floor nobody else on this list has proven they own.

10. Douglas Seth, Flagler Palm Coast, So., 4A

The only underclassman in the top ten, and the only Floridian to break 16:00 anywhere other than Cecil Field.

Seth won the Spikes & Spurs Classic in Palm Coast in 15:59.5 and led the Bulldogs to a 23-point team win. We will be honest about the limits here: only 16 boys at that meet had a 2025 state time on file, and their results scattered too widely to price the course the way we priced Holloway. So we are not converting his time.

We do not need to. Seth ran 1.6 seconds faster than his own state mark, in August, as a sophomore, and his state mark was 16:01.1 as a freshman. Boys who improve on that curve tend to keep doing it, and he has two more seasons of it after this one.

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Just missed

• Bryant Olson (Niceville, So.) ran 15:44 for fifth at Cecil, 26.1 seconds up, and anchors our projected 4A team favorite.
• Jack Michalak (Belen Jesuit, Jr.) went 15:47 for seventh, 18.5 seconds better, and is the third piece of the Belen problem.
• Andrew Sides (Buchholz, Jr.) took 42.1 seconds off for 15:49, the second-biggest improvement of the weekend.
• Luke Ross (Ponte Vedra, Sr.) was second at Spikes & Spurs in 16:04.9, within a half-second of his own state time.
• Gabriel Harris (Lake Wales, Sr.) ran 16:21.1 at Holloway, roughly 15:43 once the course is accounted for.
• Sean Cunningham (Providence, Sr.) went with Cruz early and paid 16:23 for it, but the 15:47.8 he ran at state is still on the record and he is still our No. 6 returner.
• Dylan Macias-Buenrostro (Mariner, Jr.) sat out the weekend and remains our tenth-ranked returner.

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What this list is worth

Not much, yet, and we would rather say that than dress it up. Four of our top ten did not race. Two of the ten are ranked on a converted time rather than a raw one. The weekend's biggest riser was 47th in our own preseason numbers, which is a fair reminder of how much a Florida summer can change.

What the course math does buy is a defensible way to compare a boy in Lakeland to a boy in Jacksonville on the same weekend, which raw times cannot do. We will run it again after every weekend that gives us enough overlap, and the list will move.

The full opening-weekend recap, including the girls' races and the other nine meets, is here.