A conference championship: that’s the goal of many sports programs, the boys’ cross country team among them.

In the Cap-8, the formidable competition in boys’ cross country made that a daunting task, one that coach Patrick Marshall’s boys had not accomplished in his X years coaching the team.

In fact, one has to go back to the 90s for our last conference champion boys’ team.

All that changed Oct. 18 when the boys took first place at the inaugural NAC-VI conference meet in Wendell.

The runners believe that the support of each other and their coaches has helped them make it to this point.

That support has also allowed the runners to cut time off their personal records.

“I’ve like cut two minutes off my time which is really hard to do in a season, and I have the coaches to thank for that for their training schedules,” senior Ben Brisard said.

Brisard finished fourth for the Cougars and fourteenth overall with his time of 18:40.26 at the conference meet.

Our first place runner, John Autry, was the conference champion with is 17:18.16 time, ahead of Ethan Boyd from Rolesville, 17:37.99.

Autry was pleased with the turnout at conference and believes that the team trained a lot harder than most of the teams, which contributed to the win.

“We’ve all worked very hard. We’ve been running for like several years most of us, and we’ve been having practice in summer, so it’s really rewarding to win.” Autry said.

Former Cap-8 rival and new conference foe Heritage posed a challenge for the boys in the meet.

“Probably the last stretch because there was a couple of Heritage guys that you had to try to beat to get our placing,” Brisard said.

The boys ended up edging Heritage 46 to 57 for the win.

Brisard said, “Our team was able to group up and finish towards the end which got us a good points.”