Bolingbrook face tougher road out of sectional

The road to yet another sectional berth just got tougher as the Raiders boys cross country team is preparing for the Bolingbrook Regional meet on Saturday.

The competition starts at 11 a.m. at DuPage River Park in Naperville.

Last season, the Raiders grabbed the last qualifying spot in the meet as they edged out Argo in the regional.

This season, the IHSA shook the teams up and now instead of seven there are nine teams and only Romeoville and Lockport remain with Bolingbrook. All four Plainfield Schools along with Neuqua Valley and Oswego East will now be competing with the Raiders for the right to go to sectionals.

"Looking at all the regionals, I think ours is one of the harder ones in the state. You have two top 10 teams in Neuqua Valley and Lockport and you have a couple of teams that are really running well," Bolingbrook coach Art Pahl said. "Lockport and Neuqua are shoo-ins probably with Plainfield South as well. We just have to run well, drop some time and defeat four other schools to make it."

The top five teams Saturday advance to the Lockport Sectional on Oct. 24.

Unlike the conference meet, Bolingbrook will hopefully be at or near full strength as Mark Carlson might come back as he had another week to rest his injury.

Bolingbrook's top runners did not participate in the varsity conference meet as Stephen Garrett ran in the frosh-soph race and placed third while Ricardo Rodriguez was unable to race in the varsity meet.

"Time-wise I'm happy, but it is tough to compare to what some of the other schools have ran due to the course differences," Pahl said. "If everyone shows up to run, we have a shot."

Garrett, who will probably be Bolingbrook's No. 1 runner looks poised to beat his time of 17 minutes, 33 seconds which was good enough for 24th place in last year's regional meet.

"I'm going to have to try to stay with the front pack that will have a lot of the Neuqua runners in it," Garrett said. "I want to finally set a PR (personal record)."

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