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Coming into the 2007 Maymont Festival, Blacksburg's Peter Dorrell still felt he had something to prove. His track credentials with bests of 4:15 for 1600 and 9:09 for 3200 meters to go along with a state meet championship triple should have been enough, but still his name had not been given the same vote of confidence as others who had superior cross country seasons last fall in fellow Virginians Griff Graves, Jason Witt, and Thomas Porter. After his 15:31 course win over the foremention runners in the invitational division this weekend in Richmond, Dorrell can now be considered just as good of a cross country runner as he is a track runner. Dorrell and Midlothian's Jason Witt broke away from the rest of the field in the last mile, but it took a strong surge from Dorrell in the long downhill leading into the 4K mark to shake his final challenger in Witt, who ended up second in 15:35.
The Southeast boys clearly have a lot of work to do in order to catch up with the rest of the nation's cross country teams as Medina of Ohio came in to beat virtually the best that the region has to offer including US #6 and Southeast #1 Oakton. Medina was not even ranked in the top 10 in the Midwest region coming into this weekend, yet still pulled out a 12 point win over Southeast #1 Oakton (146 pts) with a team score of 134. Oakton still remains as the top team in the Southeast as the squads finishing behind them certainly were no slouches.
Two state champion teams from a year ago in AAA's Midlothian and AA's Brentsville showed some fight in them after taking humbling early season losses. Midlothian was easily defeated by Oakton earlier at Great Meadow in a fourth place finish, but was only 16 points behind at Maymont in third place. Meanwhile, Brentsville had to have been a bigger surprise going against higher ranked AA squads in Western Albemarle and Jamestown to come out in fifth place (162 pts) at Maymont to defeat Southeast #3 and AA #1 Jamestown (8th, 234 pts) and AA #2 Western Albemarle (6th, 194 pts). Oak Ridge of Tennessee (178 pts) was able to finish right in the middle of the Virginian schools in fourth place to improve five places from their 2006 Maymont finish.
More to come on the Maymont boys...