What are some of the best XC teams in history?

Just looked it up. CBA sat their top 6 (by PR) for the state meet and still won, 24-103-137

It is worth noting that they did only get 4th at NXN, and barely won their NXR meet. Still crazy deep team.

Did a hypothetical meet with top 5 teams since 2018.

1) Newbury Park by a long shot.

2) Another Newbury Park team.

3-4) CM and LP basically tied.

To be clearer, I used the speed ratings for the top 5 teams in each of 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 and ran a hypothetical meet.

I was at that race. York won by over 100 points, and put 6 runners in the top 25 after taking the individuals out. But the splits were incredible between 2-6. And the 7th runner was a late add since Tim Hobbs was injured- he later was state champ in the 800. York went 1-3-4-6-10-17-5 for 24 points, 2nd place had 139. Split from 2-6 was just 24 seconds. If you add in Don sage, at 1-7, it was around 50 seconds.

A lot of people are offering up recent results, but this one- and Carmel (Rudy Chapas) - are well worth considering among the best ever. And no boys team comes close to York's 28 state titles in 50 years. And no finish, until recently, lower than 8th under Newton. That's over 61 years of Newton coaching.

50, for that last finisher, Jay McGrane. Not 5, typo.

North Allegheny is a good team in Pennsylvania right now. They are nowhere near one of the greatest teams ever. Have their boys ever even qualified for Nike Nationals? Their girls did once and got smashed. There have been better teams in Pennsylvania over the years than the current NA team.

Mead (Spokane WA) went three years in a row in the early 90's scoring 28, 20, and 31.

Yes and No.

in.milesplit.com

1974 IHSAA State Cross Country Meet 1974 - Boys Results

MileSplits official Boys Results formatted results for the 1974 1974 IHSAA State Cross Country Meet, hosted by Terre Haute North Vigo High School in Indianapolis IN.

Link:in.milesplit.com/meets/333842-1974-ihs...

In '74 the big trio went 1, 2, 5....and the team finished 4th. Looks like their 5th man was way back. 4th at 23, 5th at 74. That had the largest 1-5 spread of any team at State.

Alan

gonna throw my opinions in here, boys side only.

lots of teams have had really great depth, and really great consistency. Great Oak and CBA come to mind as the best depth ever, and York and Great Oak come to mind for most consistent. But I think the question is asking for best single-year HS squad in XC history, so my list would go like this:

1 - '21 Newbury (by an incredibly long shot)

2 - '22 Newbury (much closer to Earth, still quite a bit better than everything after)

3/4 tie - '20 Newbury and '21 Cheyenne Mountain (going by speed ratings both extremely close. If I had to give the edge to one team it would be Newbury though, as they had far fewer good opportunities to put a solid race together and likely underperformed during their Covid-abreviated season more than Cheyenne did, as reflected by their respective track times the following seasons)

5 - '18 Loudoun Valley

6-10 in any order - '17 Loudoun Valley, '11 CBA, '12 Arcadia, '19 Great Oak, '93 Mead

As I'm sure is apparent there's a lot of recency bias in this list. This is for two reasons:

Firstly, past great teams such as Lompoc, Elmhurst (York), Mead, South Eugene Axemen etc were incredible for their time, but these teams were slightly less impressive when only looking at XC results, instead of track times (with the exception of Mead). You can't really fault them for it considering there were so much fewer national opportunities to compete in XC, and the courses they did compete on's records were much slower back then, but if you look at how a team like York performed on Detwiler, or Mead on Woodward Park, and then apply modern speed ratings, it's apparent how their don't really hold up to a lot of modern teams, especially when it comes to their 4th and 5th men.

Secondly, high school running is just much deeper now. Better training with better shoes, more opportunities for talented kids to seek out opportunities and information, and just way more high school age kids living in the US too, due to population growth. You can see this growth most immediately in the depth of the top ranks of high school running in recent years, (case and point 12 American kids 4:01 or better last year in the mile) but IMO the biggest reflection of this is in the depth and strength of XC teams at large.

Those AF teams were a sight to behold. Crazy to think both teams scored less than the team that went 1-2-3.

CM was missing their top guy at SW. Probably a 20 point swing?

I'd also point towards the 200x-201x North Central teams. Multiple NXN appearances, including several podiums.

I don’t remember the details, but when I was in high school in the early 90s, there was a public school called Corona del Sol that had 5 guys under 4:15 in the mile that were all top 10 at state in XC. Their number 4 ended up winning the 10,000 at Stanford.

Just noticed a slight mistake, CBA didn't win 24-103-137.

What you were looking at was the NJCTC Championship - AKA the New Jersey Catholic Track Conference Championship - A very good meet to be sure, but not state.

Here were the state results:

CBA - 110

Holmdel - 133

West Windsor-Plainsboro South - 149

Still an incredibly impressive win, but not quite as insane as that makes it sound.

I don't think people realize that the CIF State meet is a true XC course and a far more difficult course to run than a flat 5k course like runninglane.... A very bad comparison here.

2004 Ethiopia

tough to quantify the differences in eras, not to mention the recency bias and especially the absence of national championship races back in the day, but lompoc 1972 should enter the conversation--here are some other teams on a pre-2010 list...

milesplit.com

XC Legacy Special Edition: 1972 National XC Rankings w/ Doug Speck story

Aron Taylor

The 1972 XC Legacy hightlights Lompoc CA, with an incredible piece by the late Doug Speck.

Link:www.milesplit.com/articles/41049

There’s a big difference between schools today and schools in the 1970s-1990s. To get kids to enroll in your school and have the recruiting equivalent of a college program vs having a homegrown program is drastically different. Most of the current schools that are mentioned in this thread do not have teams comprised of kids that live in their boundaries. What school has done the most with the kids that live within their boundaries and are supposed to go there? I don’t have the answer, but that’s the real question here. It’s also not just a question for track or XC.

FM and Saratoga both in upstate NY.