Washington's Incoming Freshman Class · Cross Country Intelligence
This cycle's subject: Class of 2030 · Fall 2026 Season
View The GridWashington middle school cross country has no central database. The marks below were rebuilt from raw championship results — MileSplit result sheets, district files, club races — because no single source is complete, and the checking surfaced entire leagues missing from standard rankings, athletes who appear nowhere else, and distance labels that were simply wrong. So this file runs on two hard rules. One: every mark is recorded at the exact distance the source reported. Two: distances are never combined or converted — four boards, four distances, no crossover. The Projected 5K column is the athlete's verified pace held flat across 5,000 meters, with zero credit for a summer of training: a floor, not a ceiling — and it only runs where the distance is verified. No distance, no projection. Course and conditions still swing a middle school time significantly (see: The Mook Effect), so read every number as directional. Spot something wrong or missing? Help Improve Project 29.
PRIMARY
SUBJECTS
One athlete per gender, chosen from the verified boards. The boards are never cross-ranked — these two are the strongest signals the research surfaced, and neither appeared in any public incoming-freshman ranking before this file pulled the raw results.
TEEPLES
"Ran 10:10.0 for two miles in the Mid-Columbia league — a league this file hadn't found until a parent flagged it. He now leads both the 2 Mile and 3,000m boards outright."
FLANSBURG
"Won the NSD district title by 1.16 seconds over Sienna Rector — a photo finish from a district the standard rankings never saw at all."
THE
GRID
Four boards. Four distances. Marks recorded exactly as the result sheet reported them — never combined, never converted. Ranks are reserved for grade-verified 8th graders; everything else is flagged and held, in plain sight.
Reader-flagged correction (added this cycle) // Elijah Teeples (Desert Hills MS, Kennewick) now leads both the 2 Mile and 3,000m boards — a full league, the Mid-Columbia MSAA (Tri-Cities), had never been targeted for this file until a parent pointed us at his profile. His 3,000m mark should have surfaced in our original NXR Northwest pull and didn't; that raw sheet is getting a full re-check for other missed entries, not just this one name. He also carries a verified 2,850m mark (9:25.6, Oct 11, Max Jensen Invitational) — a fifth distance with no comparison field yet, held here rather than forced onto a board it doesn't match.
HELP IMPROVE
PROJECT 29
Middle school cross country results are often spread across district websites, timing companies, club events, and archived PDFs. While every effort has been made to build the most complete incoming freshman rankings possible, additional results and corrections are always welcome.
If you have verified performances, missing athletes, corrected schools, race results, or updates, please reach out directly.
Project 29 is intended to be a living document that improves with help from athletes, parents, coaches, and the running community.
russell@russell-moore.com
There is no varsity file on any of these names yet — and until this cycle, there wasn't much of a middle school file either. The original base layer came from a single database wearing a single blanket distance label. Rebuilding it from raw championship results turned up entire districts the rankings never saw: LWSD's boys, all of Northshore's girls, Spokane's parochial league, the Thurston County youth circuit.
Project 29 starts the file the moment there's a number worth recording — then lets real data overwrite it, week by week.
A 2,575-meter championship is not a 1.5-mile race, and pretending otherwise is how bad rankings get made. Jace Pratt's 7:59.2 wore the wrong label all winter — the verified distance moved his pace-hold projection from 16:32 to 15:30. A full minute of error from one bad label.
The girls' board was worse. A mislabeled league-dual mark projected Ailana Koropchak at a 26:28 5K; her verified championship 2-mile pace-holds to 20:22. Six minutes of phantom slowness — the label was the problem, not the athlete. That is why the grid runs four separate boards and never converts between them.
Not every mark on these boards was earned under the same conditions. A fast course inflates a time; a slow one buries it. Russell Moore's own course-variance research — the "Mook Effect" — found top runners posting personal records averaging over a minute faster on a single downhill-oriented course compared to their other races that same season.
Applied here: a middle schooler's mark says as much about the day they ran it as it does about their ceiling. Treat every rank on these boards as a starting hypothesis, not a verdict.
The pace-hold model is deliberately conservative — it assumes zero developmental gain between an 8th-grade season and a 9th-grade fall, which is almost never true for an athlete who made a verified championship board as a middle schooler. And it only runs on verified distances: the Under Verification list gets no projection at all, because a pace without a distance is a guess.
What we're actually tracking is the size of the jump. Weeks 1 and 2 of the real season will tell us who closed the gap the model assumes — and whose middle school course was telling the truth.
PRESEASON
SIGNALS
vs. RECTOR
TEEPLES
CHENEY
