WILLINGBORO — Cross country season may have started six weeks ago for a lot of teams. For Cherokee, it began yesterday.
Cherokee has been missing several of its top runners with a variety of injuries, illnesses and combinations of both. People have been coming and going, popping in and out of the lineup, but the Chiefs have never been at full strength.
So while they've slowly drifted down the New Jersey rankings — from seventh a few weeks ago to 10th this week — they've slowly started to get people back.
Yesterday, finally at full strength — almost — Cherokee placed its five scorers in the top 15 and ran away with the team title at the 39th annual Burlington County Open with 47 points, well ahead of Moorestown (84), Cinnaminson (96) and Shawnee (99).
The title was the 10th in the last 12 years for Cherokee, which is still missing Matt McCarroll, a top-five runner out with mono.
“A lot of people probably expected us to be running better, but when you have guys out, you're not going to be the same team,” said senior Chris Applegate, who was sixth. “This is the first time we've had almost the whole team together and we ran really well.
“We want to keep the tradition going. We feel like we should always be good enough to win the County Open.”
With about a mile left, Shawnee junior David Forward blasted from a pack that included Northern Burlington's Michael Bowden, Lenape's Ryan Garvin and Cinnaminson's Todd Campbell and ran away with the individual title. He ran 16:04, a course record on the 5,000-meter layout. Cherokee's Keith Krieger ran 15:43 on a somewhat shorter version of the course in 2002. [Forward broke the official course record of 16:05, set by Cinnaminson's Bill Mason in 1998, although Krieger would have run faster on a full course in 2002.]
After Bowden, Garvin and Campbell crossed the line, Cherokee had five of the next 11 finishers, with Steve Burkholder fifth, Applegate sixth, Sean Hartnett ninth, Ryan McNair 12th and Marc Saccomanno — in his first race of the year — 15th.
“We've been training hard since the summer, multiple workouts each week, long runs, putting in the work,” Applegate said. “This is the first time we've had the full lineup and it's encouraging for the end of the season. Now that we have five to seven guys healthy, we can get back up where we should be and where people expect us to be.”
This was actually the first time since 1997 that Cherokee didn't have anybody finish among the top four. But their scoring pack finished in a 44-second span.
“Marc [Saccomanno] hasn't run a race all year, so he was kind of an unknown, but it was great to see him real close to our top four,” coach Steve Shaklee said. “I'm certainly happy with how we ran as a group. I don't think we could have run any better considering everything.”
By the time Cherokee had its fifth runner through the chute, nobody else had more than two in.
“We're finally showing what we can do,” Burkholder said. “This is the start of our championship season. We knew it was just a matter of time before we started getting everybody back and running the way we're capable of. And we're only going to get better.”. . .