Imagine stepping up to a start line along with 200 other runners. Your body is cold as you take off your sweats and hand them to your teammates behind the line. The cold kicks in deeper and so do your nerves. The course you are about to run is 5 kilometers long along with hills, gravel, rocks, and roots all between you and the finish line. And to add another layer of discomfort to the anxiety and excitement that boils into adrenaline, it is also 7 pm and dark.

This is the experience of most runners who run in the Bob McIntyre Twilight Invitational Cross Country Meet held every year, which is open to many high school teams in Massachusetts. Multiple races are held including the boys and girls freshman races, the boys and girls sophomore races, the boys and girls junior varsity races, and the boys and girls varsity. Each race has somewhere around 200 runners involve and almost 30 schools participating in each race.  Competition is tense on both a team level as well as on an individual level. Having one runner from a team place is the top twenty-five is impressive, never mind multiple runners. Last Friday, the Somerset Berkley Boys’ JV cross country team managed just that.

The SBRHS JV boys first scored when Ethan Rebello, a freshman, led the team coming in 6th out of 212 runners and with a time of 18:07 minutes for a 3.1-mile race. Aidan Quigley took the next place for Somerset Berkley coming in 10th place with a time of 18:26 minutes. Aidan Montag took 13th followed by Aidan Karpics in 23th. Sean Kennedy came in 29th and Dylan Moniz took the next place for SBRHS coming in 56th. With most of the team coming in the front of the pack, Somerset Berkley was able to score the most points out all 25 teams that were involved in the JV boy’s division 2 race.

Overall, the race was an impressive win for these Somerset Berkely runners and a great demonstration of how cross country really is a team sport.