Paly’s varsity cross country boys can add the title of league champions to their 2007 resume, after besting 13 other Santa Clara Valley Athletic League (SCVAL) teams in the League Finals on Tuesday afternoon at the Crystal Springs course in Belmont.

The team’s win Tuesday marks their second league championship in the past three years.

The cross country boys also made history in their league Tuesday. According to senior co-captain Sam Jones, the sum of the finishing times of the top five varsity boy runners from Paly (82 minutes) now stands as one of the fastest combined times ever run on the 2.95-mile Crystal Springs course from any team in the league’s history.

Although the San Jose Mercury News’ Oct. 24 Central Coast Section (CCS) rankings had placed Mountain View, Santa Clara and Gunn’s varsity cross country boys ahead of Paly’s unranked boys, the Vikings defeated all three fellow El Camino division powerhouses Tuesday. When combined with the separate race results from SCVAL’s De Anza Division, Paly’s boys still topped the league.

Sophomore Philip MacQuitty once again led the varsity pack in Tuesday’s race, but this time, Mountain View sophomore Garrett Rowe accompanied him in the front. The two stayed neck-and-neck for the majority of the race, yet MacQuitty would not stand to lose to Rowe.

“I thought to myself, ‘I have to win; I can’t let this sophomore beat me’,” MacQuitty said.

After a heated sprint across the last stretch of the course, both MacQuitty and Rowe clocked in with a finish of 15 minutes, 12 seconds, but MacQuitty edged Rowe by a fraction of a second, thus barely claiming first place in the race.

No. 2 Paly runner junior Charlie Avis crossed the finish line at a seventh place 16:07, while senior Brian Karvelas took tenth place at 16:19. Senior Julius Berezin, junior Skyler Cummins, Jones and senior Gilbert Choi were the next four Paly varsity finishers, all completing the course within 10 seconds of each other at 16:35, 16:39, 16:42 and 16:45 respectively.

Though all of Paly’s varsity athletes ran the course well under 17 minutes, Cummins predicts that the team’s best performances are yet to come.

“None of us ran as fast today as we will in CCS,” Cummins said.

Earning an overall team score of 77 in SCVAL, Paly’s varsity boys scraped by their main El Camino Division competitors of Mountain View and Santa Clara by two points and four points respectively. Gunn accumulated a team score exactly double of Paly’s team score.

Jones is extremely pleased with the results of Tuesday’s meet.

“It was a complete team effort,” Jones said of the race Tuesday. “Everyone PRed [achieved personal records] and ran well. We also beat the two teams we were projected to lose to.”

MacQuitty agrees and is optimistic about the team’s chances of moving on to bigger and better things.

“I’m very happy with the team’s performance today,” MacQuitty said. “We all ran great…We proved that we have a big shot of making it to States this year.”

Now, with more than a week to prepare for the CCS meet, Cummins believes staying healthy, getting enough sleep, and running the best they can are the ingredients necessary for the team to have a successful race at CCS.

Paly’s cross country boys will return to the Crystal Springs course for the CCS meet, set for 2:20 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 10.