GATORS TAKE THIRD AT MBIL CHAMPIONSHIPS

It is hard to be disappointed when the stopwatch says that your team ran faster than they ever have, faster even than anybody at Brimmer and May ever has. It is also hard to be disappointed when you are one of three teams to thoroughly dominate a championship race. Even so, the Gator runners were hoping for more than their third place finish at Wednesday's MBIL Championships held on the campus of Gann Academy in Waltham. Nonetheless, there was plenty to make the Big Green Running Machine smile and return to Middlesex Road filled with pride in all they accomplished this season.

Gann, B.U. Academy—the first and second place teams, respectively—and Brimmer and May grabbed sixteen of the top twenty spots in the race, with Kyle Anderson '15 finishing fifth overall in a time of 17:46 on the 3.1 mile course. Kyle's effort easily would have been enough to win last year's championship race on the same course. Andrew Melton '15 finished tenth overall, clocking in at 18:57, and he was followed by the tandem of Nicos Topulos '16 and Raymond Ma '13, who paced each other the entire race and finished 17th and 18th respectively. Houghton Yonge '14 rounded out Brimmer's scoring with his best placing of the year as the 23rd runner to cross the finish line. Although on this day she wasn't a factor in the competition against Gann and B.U., Alberte Thorsgaard '18 earned MBIL recognition as the third girl to finish the race; she was 33rd overall with a time of 20:55, just five seconds behind the second place girl, a veteran runner who is six years her senior.

In all, ten of the twelve Gator runners who competed set personal best times, with some improving by as much as a minute and a half. Based on their tremendous improvement over the course of the season, and given the extraordinarily young age of the Brimmer harriers—the crew that ran and took third in the conference featured no seniors, one junior, and three middle schoolers—we can expect even greater success from the 2012 version of the varsity cross country team.