Ten Class A Boys Teams With Shots At Winning In 2018

Mankato Loyola/Cleveland

2017 was a dream season for the Loyola/Cleveland Crusaders. Undefeated in the regular season, a third-place finish at State, and then qualifying for True Team State in track primarily thanks to the strength of their distance events, Loyola will be the one team hurt the most on this list by graduation. With three of their top seven runners moving on, their 1-5 spread jumps to almost three minutes, and almost two thirds of that is the gap between the PR of Micah Rentschler and senior Alec Schaefer. Thankfully, if his near-five-minute performances in the 1600m on the track last spring are any indication, Schaefer will certainly cut that gap down and improve his 5k PR by a very substantial margin, putting Loyola once again in great position to perform well as a team. But with little depth and possibly not much more help coming beyond Schaefer, there is perhaps no number-five runner in all of Class A that is being counted on as much.