Is Aubrey Bishop the most improved runner in South Jersey? She’s certainly one of them.
Bishop, a Kingsway junior, earned an auto qualifier for the Meet of Champions Saturday when she placed 9th in a loaded state Group 4 race at Holmdel County Park.
Bishop ran 19:24, which is a Holmdel PR by 99 seconds and 116 seconds faster than she ran at states last year.
As a sophomore, Bishop set a Holmdel best of 21:03 at Shore Coaches and then placed 65th at states in 21:30.
She ran 5:51.68 and 12:53.45 last spring, but she must have had one heck of a summer of training because she showed up for XC a completely different runner.
Bishop opened her season with an all-course 5,000 PR of 19:24.49 at Cumberland Regional and lowered it to 19:15.01 a few days later at Salem Tech.
But her big breakthrough came at Shore Coaches, when she ran 20:01 at Holmdel and placed 9th in the B race, which included girls from some of New Jersey’s top teams – Ridgewood, Princeton and West Windsor-Plainsboro North.
She lowered her all-course PR to 18:43.27 when she placed 2nd to Williamstown’s Sophia Aldridge at the Gloucester County meet at West Deptford Park and then took 2nd to Aldridge again at the Tri-County Conference Showcase at Cumberland Regional, where she ran 19:07.06.
From there it was off to sectionals in Logan Township, where she had a fantastic race with another 5,000 all-course PR of 18:33.29 and placed 3rd in Group 4 behind Cherry Hill East’s Addison Weiss and Cherokee’s Alyssa Suriano. That’s 2nd-fastest by a Kingsway girl at DREAM Park behind only Aubrey Pierontoni’s 18:24.57 at 2021 sectionals.
On Saturday, Bishop had another big race, running 19:23.10 at states and finishing 3rd among South Jersey girls, behind Weiss [3rd in 18:52.21] and Aldridge [7th in 19:14.51].
Her time is 3rd-fastest ever by a Kingsway girl at Holmdel, behind two-time Meet of Champions winner Chelsea Ley, who ran 17:44 at 2008 Shore Coaches, and Rachel Vick, who ran 18:29 at the 2016 state Group 4 meet and went on to place 3rd at M-of-C with.
Bishop’s 19:23.10 was 8th-fastest among all South Jersey runners Saturday and 35th-fastest among all runners in the six state championship races. Last year her 21:20 ranked 50th among South Jersey girls and 224th state-wide.
Bishop qualified for Meet of Champions as a top-10 finisher. She’ll line up alongside New Jersey’s best runners at 11 a.m. Saturday back at Holmdel.
The last Kingsway girl to finish in the top 25 at Meet of Champs is Alexis Mullarkey, who placed 19th in 2017 in 19:09.
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 