One Month In, A Look At State Title Matchups On The Boys Side

3A Boys

Photo by Howard Anderson

3A Boys 5K Rankings

Perhaps no state championship matchup looks as interesting and wide-open at the moment as this year's 3A race. Three boys have run under 16 minutes this season, and two over the past weekend. Bel Air's Kieran McDermott, coming off his 4:11.94 1600 last spring, ran a personal best 15:33 at the Paul Short Invitational on Friday. McDermott also has the fastest returning time from the 2016 state meet of anyone in the 3A classification.

Photo by Craig Amoss

McDermott wasn't the only 3A runner with a breakout race this weekend. North Hagerstown's Nate Neely ran 15:51 in a victory at the Carlisle Invitational, also in Pennsylvania, to lift him to second on the 3A leaderboard. Then there's Linganore's Michael Belmaggio who was first in the race to sub-16, which he did in his victory at the Hood College Invitational back on September 16th. With three more runners having posted sub-16:15 performances this year as well, it's still probably too early to make any definite predictions for this year's 3A state race.