Boys Overall Team Rankings — Week 1

Cecil Field. 15:54.4 average, the only team in Florida under 16:00, inside a 1:17 spread. Cruz 15:06, Michalak 15:47, Liam Salom 15:54, Nicholas Veloso 16:22, Dominic De Armas 16:23. They won the Cecil Field team title 75-158.

Marcelo Mantecon did not run, and here is what that is worth in this format: Belen's returning five, with Mantecon in it, projects to a 15:47.3 average and a score of 93 — better than the 108 they earned on the track. They are ranked on what they ran, which understates them, and they are still 61 points clear of the field.

Our preseason projection had Belen's 3A team score at 20 points, the lowest of any boys team in Florida in any class. Nothing about August moved it.

Cecil Field. 16:09.8 average with a 0:55 spread, the tightest one-through-five of any team that raced. Rishi Chopra 15:39, Matthew Ishee 15:54, then Churchill, Morley and Lasota in a fifteen-second knot from 16:20 to 16:34. Chopra took 37.7 seconds off his state time and Ishee 25.7.

Projected second in 4A at 99 points, second at Cecil Field, second here. There is nothing to argue about.

Take Spikes & Spurs at face value and Flagler is a 16:47 team average, behind Bolles and well behind Lake Minneola. The course ran 27.8 seconds slow. Convert, and Flagler's average is 16:20.1 — third in Florida, ahead of both.

Douglas Seth's winning 15:59.5 becomes 15:31.7. Behind him Dylan Ciardi, Mateo Almeida, Enzo McGovern and Owen Stackpole all land inside 16:52, and the whole five fits in 1:19.7. They won the meet with 23 points to Ponte Vedra's 54.

They had one returner from the 2025 state meet. There is no history holding this up. It is one Saturday on a course we can price, and it is the strongest single-day performance in Florida outside Cecil Field.

Cecil Field, 16:37.6, spread 0:56, and not a single runner in the state's top twenty. Brantley Rigdon 16:04, Aidan Chandler 16:28, Armaan Sharma 16:44, Wyatt Cleek 16:52, Vincent Barragan 17:00, sixth man 17:05.

Projected first in 2A at 52 points, and now looking over its shoulder at a 2A team four places back that did not race.

Their 16:23.0 average is the second-best number in Florida, better than Flagler's and 14 seconds better than Bolles's. They rank fifth, because standard scoring does not care about averages.

Quentin Thompson 15:16, Jacob Kelly 16:07, Drew Sasson 16:08, Matthew Lydiard 16:26 — a front four nobody outside Belen can match. Then Joshua Ping at 17:58, place 295 in the virtual field, and a 2:42 spread that is the widest in the top ten.

Close that gap by a minute and Lake Minneola is second in Florida.

The team that changes this list.

Bishop Kenny returns five from the state meet at a 16:53.2 average with a 0:40.7 spread — tighter than any team in Florida averaging under 17:30 actually managed to run in August. Thomas Milton 16:36.5, Ethan Reid 16:37.1, Brian Martinez 16:41.9, Quinn Mullaney 17:16.2, Dayne Kimball 17:17.2.

They did not enter a meet. Projected third in 3A at 103 points, behind Belen and Vanguard, and sixth in the state on the only scale that puts everybody in the same race.

The risk on a team like this is obvious: five returners is the minimum, so there is no margin if one of them is hurt or gone. The upside is that a forty-second pack is the hardest thing in cross country to build and the easiest thing to keep.

Jim Ryun, where Holloway Park took 38.2 seconds off everybody. Jack Bronder's 16:41.3 converts to 16:03.1, and a raw team average of 18:07 becomes 16:52.7. They won the meet with 76 points.

If you distrust course conversions, this is the ranking you distrust. It is also the best-supported conversion outside Cecil Field — forty runners raced both Holloway and the state meet — so we are standing behind it.

Seven returners, a 16:56.0 state average, a 1:06.3 spread, and no meet this weekend. Adrian Iziliaev 16:24.5 leads. Projected second in 2A at 64 points.

Which means two of Florida's top eight teams are 2A schools, and one of them has not been seen since November. Whatever 2A was supposed to be this year, it is deeper at the top than 3A outside Belen.

Cecil Field, 16:57.8, spread 1:30, Eli Scharf 16:21 and Samuel Cassiani 16:33. Two returners from state, so like Flagler they are ranked mostly on new evidence, and unlike Flagler they got there without a front-runner.

The most uncomfortable entry on this page, and the best illustration of what this method does.

Niceville is our projected 4A team favorite at 37 points, built on six returners averaging 16:22.3 with a 0:28.1 spread — a tighter pack on paper than Bishop Kenny's. If they had stayed home, this method would have entered them at 16:22.9 and scored them 237 — third in Florida, ahead of Flagler Palm Coast.

They raced instead. Bryant Olson ran 15:44 for fifth overall, twenty-six seconds better than his state time as a sophomore. Then 16:56, 17:17, 17:21, 17:26 — a 1:42 spread from a group whose state times say 0:28.

Tenth is where the weekend put them. Third is where the paper puts them. The gap between those two numbers is the single largest disagreement on this list, and August is not the month that settles it.