Class AA Boys
For the past half-decade, Minnesota's Section 6AA race has been growing a national reputation as one of the most notorious state-qualifying races in the country. 2015 is where that notoriety came to a head; all four of Minnesota's top teams were in that section, meaning both Edina and 2014's NXN national runner-up Wayzata were left home to watch Hopkins and Minneapolis Washburn run at state, only to both compete at NXN a month later.
But 2016 was a very different story. Section 6AA was as strong as ever, but US#7 Wayzata has been the clear frontrunner all season, including a strong win over a packed field in the Roy Griak Invitational. In the end, the team that once defeated eventual 3rd-place finisher Maple Grove with only their JV squad proved their superiority with a dominating total of 38 points, led by a second-place finish for junior Khalid Hussein. Wayzata led as a team for the whole race, sitting at 31 points at the mile and 30 points at the two-mile.
The runner up team from Edina took a more circuitous route to get to the finish. After having been ranked behind Wayzata the whole season and facing injuries and illness that took out senior Zach Miller and sophomore Owen Smalley for a while, and even a scary practice accident involving senior Patrick Roos, the 23rd-ranked team in the nation can head to the Nike Heartland Regional healthy and fresh off a solid 91-point performance at State.
While the individual battles in the Class AA race were not nearly as neck-and-neck as the individual battles in the Class A race, the ultimate result was equally interesting. The race started with the slowest mile on record for a State boys championship. Innocent Murwanashyaka of Como Park led with only a 5:10.8. The combination of the slow start and the heat ended up making things very interesting as the race went on. Most of the top runners ran sub-five minutes for their second mile, and not long after, the pack began to thin out at the top. In the end, only five runners ran faster than 16 minutes. The last time five or fewer runners ran under 16 minutes in a Class AA boys race was 2009, which had the second-slowest opening mile on record. But when the dust had settled, it was Patrick Roos, who sat in 27th place at the mile, didn't take the lead for the first time until the homestretch, and only won a varsity race one other time in his life, that came away with the victory.
Coming into the meet, there were six runner who were generally considered in a class of their own amongst all the other runners, and only a dive by Cloquet's Isaac Boedigheimer past Minnetonka's Matt Wilkinson prevented a top-six sweep by those athletes. Maple Grove's Alex Miley and Como Park's Innocent Murwanashyaka were both undefeated this season and held the top two spots for most of the race. Both spent a lot of time in the medical tent after the race due to the heat. Hopkin's Seth Eliason has made a name for himself this year thanks to the five times this year that he out-kicked a competitor to the finish line, but had too much ground to make up to finish higher than 4th. And with only three seniors finishing in the top seventeen places in the competition, Wayzata's Khalid Hussein will look to be a strong favorite to upgrade his runner-up finish to a State title to join fellow Wayzata individual champions Jaret Carpenter, Connor Olson, and Josh Thorson.