The First #DerailTheTrain Team

Well folks, the state recaps are officially up and I’ll be taking a break from the PA specific coverage for the next couple weeks to refresh before track season. You may see some posts circling around the site from time to time (sometimes I just like to write for the sake of writing), but if you are a hard core PA distance fan, you’re going to have to bide your time a bit.

Incidentally, if you have any interest at all in being a writer for the next edition of this blog, now is the perfect time to jump on board. You can get in some practice on the site without me to overshadow your work. You can try some posts out, see how you like it, get feedback from myself and other readers and just have fun talking about the sport. If you don’t have my email its jarrettfelix1130@gmail.com so now you do. That means there’s no excuse! It goes for boys coverage or girls coverage if there are some of you out there who want to get involved in that. There’s a big untapped market for that stuff so the door is open for someone to become the female etrain. The shetrain if you will (not my idea, a brilliant idea from many years ago).

If we get enough writers on board, the site continues and it gives me a place to come check in at if I ever feel the itch to drop an occasion post.

But anyway, with my last recap-style post of the season, I wanted to touch on some of biggest step up performers from this year’s state meet. I decided to boldly try and predict the entire AAA state meet from 1 to 240 this past week. There was plenty to be wrong about (on average my picks were off by +/- 25 spots) which meant some kids really exceeded expectations. I’ll give you those names in this post as a shout to those kids. Here’s the top 12 over-performers ranked by net difference (actual – projected).

Noah Demis	So	North Penn
Jake Robinson	Sr	Conestoga
Paul Ghantous	Jr	LaSalle
Marino Bubba	So	Bangor
Marco Cardone	So	Easton
Jack Ettien	Jr	Bishop Shanahan
Shane Ainscoe	Sr	Spring Ford
Pepe Renteria	So	Mechanicsburg
Kevin Wagner	Sr	DT West
Zach Smith	Sr	Spring Ford
Jonathan McGrory	Sr	Bishop Shanahan
Antonio Burkhart	So	Bethel Park

Now, obviously some of the guys near the back of my predictions have a better chance of making up ground. If I predict you 10^th and you win the state championship, that’s still only 9 points despite what was likely a solid upset victory. So I decided to rank the increases on a % basis to see what happened as well. Here’s the top 12 performers ranked by percent difference (actual – projected / projected).

Noah Demis	So	North Penn
Jake Robinson	Sr	Conestoga
Christian McComb	So	Boyertown
Andrew Malmstrom	Sr	Owen J Roberts
Dan McGoey	So	North Allegheny
Seth Ketler	Jr	Seneca Valley
Czar Tarr	Sr	Chartiers Valley
Chayce Macknair	Jr	Mifflin County
Paul Ghantous	Jr	LaSalle
Matt Bodon	Sr	Stroudsburg
Shane Ainscoe	Sr	Spring Ford
Sean Guydish	Sr	Easton

You can see that the second list allows some of our medal winners to get a little extra credit for their results, even if I had them in the mix to be top 50 guys. In the team category, my excel sheet said that, based on my rankings LaSalle and CRN would be the top 2 teams with 139 and 145 points respectively. Not terrible, right? Well, at least those weren’t.

The model had Spring Ford slotted for 11^th and Bishop Shanahan slotted for 15^th! So those two schools really stepped it up. It’s probably not surprising considering they each had two runners in my top 12 list. Mechanicsburg also deserves a shout out as they were projected at #14 in the scoring and ended up in the top 10.

So congrats to all these performers! Hopefully, this list highlights a few guys who aren’t typically in my recaps or featured prominently on the blog and gives them a chance to appreciate their performance at the state championship. My opinion is obviously just one (not that smart) guys opinion, but, hey, proving the doubters wrong is proving the doubters wrong. I’m always happy to smugly rub the doubters nose in it.

Great work #derailingthetrain for those who posted awesome results this season. For those who I ended up being reasonably correct about, don’t worry. There’s always track season.

I’ll be back a little closer to regional season to give my PA based national predictions. Until then, stay classy and feel free to use this blog for discussion purposes. I’ll still moderate the comments and try and keep things as active as possible.