The Parkland boys cross country team outdistanced a 14-team field and Paul Abeln personally outdistanced everyone to win an individual title last Wednesday at the District 11 3A cross country championship at DeSales University.

The Trojans finished with 38 points, defeating second-place Nazareth with 60 points and third-place Emmaus with 87 points in the 102-boy field. Parkland had four runners in the top nine finishers and no runner finish below 22nd.

“This has been the goal of ours since the beginning,” said Abeln, a junior. “We have a pretty solid top four and five through seven are right there as well.”

Parkland coach Stephen Ott said this race would come down to who wanted it more. Coming into the race the Blue Eagles were the defending champions and Ott was certain they would be in the mix with Parkland for the title. Even after securing the league title eight days earlier, Ott told the team this championship is just one of the goals we have for the season.

“Last year was very tough on us because we were undefeated in the regular season and in the postseason Nazareth took it to us,” said Ott. “I always talk to them about going forward, enjoy this success but you’ve got to move on to the next. They did that this season and I was really proud of them. We had a of talks last year and through track that last year was last year, you learn and you grow from it. They did that. I’m so proud of them.”

Abeln improved on a 15th-plae performance from last season and ran the race 55 seconds faster than he did a year ago. He finished in 16:49 last week, eight seconds ahead of Nazareth’s Giovanni Mastromonaco. Both young men were the only runners to clock in under 17 minutes.

Parkland’s Liam McGuigan was right behind to claim third place in 17:01. Ethan Willard took sixth and finished in 17:10, while teammate Jake Barnes was ninth with a 17:20 finish. Brady Hoffman took 19th place to round out the Trojan top five. Tyler Rothrock and Praveen Sureshkumar earned respectively 21st and 22nd places.

Ott said that while he’s only allowed to bring eight runners to the district meet and only seven run, there were over 30 other runners on the boys team that share this year’s title.

“The whole team, I know there’s only eight here, but the whole team, hopefully they feel this and that motivates them,” he said.

The PIAA 3A cross country championship is scheduled for Nov. 5 at Hershey.