Brookline High's boys cross country team opened its Bay State Conference season Wednesday, Sept. 9, with a 15-50 rout of Needham, according to the Boston Herald.
A 15 is the lowest possible team score in cross country. It's a perfect score. Brookline's five scoring runners swept the top five places against the Rockets.
The Warriors are chasing a fifth consecutive Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) Division 1 state title this fall. They won their fourth straight last November, becoming the first program to accomplish that since Gloucester did it in 1997, MassLive reported in a Sept. 7 season preview. The Boston Globe ranked Brookline No. 1 in its final 2025 boys cross country poll.
Head coach Mike Glennon's squad returned only two runners from the championship roster: seniors Liam Hartmann and Ibrahim Abdel-Dayem. Hartmann placed fifth at both the 2025 Meet of Champions and the Division 1A Championship and ran a 15:36.8 to finish second at the 2025 Bay State Conference championship. Abdel-Dayem clocked 15:45.7 for sixth at the 2025 conference championship, placed 10th at Division 1A and 19th at the Meet of Champions, according to MassLive's season preview.
Behind those two, juniors Matt Ritter, Elias Thomasson, Nam Danh and Toby Paradise form the next wave. None of those runners competed at the 2025 Meet of Champions or Division 1A Championship.
"We have a target on our back, so it's a good and a bad thing," Glennon told MassLive on Sept. 7, ahead of the season opener.
At the 2025 state championship at Devens, Brookline tallied 67 points to beat runner-up Natick's 87, according to the Boston Globe. Then-senior Theodore Butty finished fourth (15:53.91) and Hartmann fifth (15:55.54). Abdel-Dayem and then-senior Harry Flint both placed inside the top 20.
Natick, Brookline's chief Bay State Conference rival, finished second at the conference championship, Division 1B Championship and Meet of Champions last season. The Redhawks figure to test the Warriors again this fall.
Wednesday's perfect score against Needham is one dual meet. The real tests come later in the conference schedule and at the postseason invitationals Glennon uses to sharpen his roster.
