From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank

There will be a very small South Jersey contingent at Brooks Northeast Regionals Saturday, and it’s possible it will consist of just one runner.

There is no entry list available on the Brooks web site, and based on who ran at Nike Northeast Regionals last wekend and who we know isn’t running, it’s possible that Cherokee sophomore Jack Tindall will be the other South Jersey representative in either of the championship races Saturday in Boston.

Tindall won the state Group 4 title in 15:54 at Holmdel but got sick soon after the race, missed some training camp and was still under the weather when he gutted out a 16:29 at the Meet of Champions, actually a remarkable performance for a runner at well below peak form.

But Tindall, while still not 100 percent, is healthy enough to take on the top runners in the Northeast U.S. over the 5,000-meter course at Franklin Park in the Roxbury section of Boston.

Brooks Northeast traces its lineage to the Kinney XC Nationals, which ran from 1979 through 1992 before becoming Foot Locker, which continued through 2019. After a year without a race in 2020, the event resurfaced in 2021 as East Bay and then changed to Champs in 2022 before returning to the Foot Locker name for the 2023 and 2024 races.

It was announced in August that the series had been cancelled, but Brooks took over a few weeks later with the same format of four regional races leading to a national championship at Balboa Park in San Diego.

The top 10 runners in each region qualify for the championship race, which is scheduled for Dec. 13.

The Northeast region includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, D.C., in addition to New Jersey.

The boys race is scheduled for 10:50 a.m. Saturday, with the girls race following at 11:30 a.m.

Two previous Cherokee runners, Marc Pelerin in 2001 and Shawn Wilson in 2012, both reached nationals. The last South Jersey runner to make nationals was Peyton Shute of Woodbury in 2023 and before that Kevin Antczak of Mainland Regional in 2019.