Will Moss sat out and is still first by 28 seconds. A Bolles junior who was in no returner file ran 16:04 at Cecil Field. Frederick Gunther won Pine Forest by forty seconds on a course nobody can convert. Seven of these ten never pinned on a number.
Florida Class 2A boys cross country, after opening weekend: August 21-22, 2026
Same method as the statewide lists and the 1A rankings. Every opening-weekend time is converted to a Cecil Field equivalent using the returners who ran both the 2025 state meet and a given course this August. Runners who did not open are entered at their 2025 state time plus 0.6 seconds and marked (P).
On the boys' side that 0.6 is functionally zero — the 158 boys who ran both Cecil Field and the state meet averaged six-tenths of a second slower in August — so a 2A boy's August time and his November time can simply be set side by side. It also makes the projections unforgiving. A boy who stayed home is credited with no summer at all, and it still leaves seven of these ten unraced.
One conversion has to be thrown out entirely. Pine Forest is built on five runners whose gaps against their own state times are −24.6, +32.3, +55.6, +60.3 and +142.5 seconds. That is a 167-second spread on a five-man sample, four of the five run for the same school, and one of them is the athlete the correction would be applied to. The +61.8 the ranker carries and the recomputed mean of +53.2 are both fiction at that sample size. Frederick Gunther's opener is treated below as unconvertible and ranked on judgment.
The offsets with enough behind them to trust: Jim Ryun (Holloway Park) off 39 runners, Ragin' Storm off 22, Lehigh off 19 and Ocoee off 10. Cecil Field is the anchor and needs no correction at all, which matters here, because eight of the ten names below either ran there or are being measured against someone who did.
The statewide versions are here: Week 1 boys top 10 and Week 1 boys team top 10. The class breakouts: 1A boys, 1A girls and 2A girls.
1. Will Moss, Montverde Academy, Sr. — (P)
The 2A state champion, back for a senior year, and the biggest margin on this board. Moss won 2A in 15:35.3, 42.5 seconds clear of the next returning boy in the class, and Montverde Academy did not enter a meet this weekend — not the boys, not the girls, not a JV squad, at any of the eleven meets.
Projected at 15:35.9, he is still first by 28 seconds over the fastest mark anybody in this class ran on a course we can convert with confidence. That is the rare case where the projection is not really in doubt, and the two runners below him would both need a substantial jump just to make it a race.
He is ranked first on a blank line in the results, and it is the only unraced number one on any of our class lists that nobody is likely to argue with.
2. Brantley Rigdon, Bolles, Jr.
The name that wasn't in any file two weeks ago. Rigdon has no 2025 state appearance — he is not in the returner data at all, at Bolles or anywhere else — and he finished 19th in the Cecil Field Elite race in 16:04.0, in the deepest boys field in Florida, ahead of Bolles's entire returning top four.
That is the fastest 2A mark of the weekend on the anchor course, with no conversion applied and none needed. He beat Armaan Sharma, the fourth-fastest returner in this class, by 40 seconds. He beat Aidan Chandler, twelfth-fastest, by 24. Whatever he was doing last November — a transfer, an injury, a season on the JV — he is now the fastest 2A boy who has actually run in 2026 by a comfortable margin.
He is ranked second on one race, which is exactly as much as anyone in this class has produced besides Moss's absence. Bolles ranks fourth in Florida as a team and first in 2A, and Rigdon is the reason the number is not lower.
3. Frederick Gunther, Pensacola Catholic, So.
The most interesting result of the weekend and the least convertible. Gunther was 56th in 2A at state in 17:21.8 as a freshman. He opened by winning the Pine Forest Invitational in 16:57.2, 39.8 seconds clear of Braeden Hunt of Gulf Breeze and 89 seconds clear of third.
Take the course conversion at face value and he becomes a 15:55 runner and the second-best boy in this class. Do not take it at face value. Pine Forest's offset rests on five athletes who disagree by nearly three minutes, three of them Gunther's own Pensacola Catholic teammates and one of them Gunther himself, which means the correction applied to him is partly derived from his own result. Leave him out of the sample and the four remaining estimates put his mark anywhere from 16:25 to 15:45. That is not a measurement. It is a range wide enough to move him from tenth to second.
What survives without the conversion: he ran 24.6 seconds faster than his state time on a course that cost Braeden Hunt a full minute and Mason Pohovey 32 seconds. Against the four runners in that race with a November comparison, he improved by 57, 80, 85 and 167 seconds relative to them, and he won by forty. That is worth third. It is not yet worth second over a 16:04 that needs no arithmetic at all.
Pensacola Catholic's next finisher was Pohovey at 19:12. Gunther needs a real field, and Pine Forest was not one — 38 boys finished it.
4. Aidan Alam, McKeel (Lakeland), So. — (P)
Fifth in 2A at state in 16:17.8 as a freshman, the second-fastest returning mark in the class, and no opener — McKeel did not enter either day. Projected at 16:18.4.
A freshman running 16:17.8 at the state meet is the strongest improvement profile on this board, and there is no way to collect on it from the sideline. He has the best claim of any (P) below Moss and the least to show for it.
5. Michael Gomez, FAU (Boca Raton), Sr. — (P)
Sixth in 2A at state in 16:18.6, eight-tenths behind Alam, and also unraced. Projected at 16:19.2. He and Alam are separated by less than a second on a board where neither number has been tested, which makes the order between them arbitrary and the pair of them a genuine problem for anyone below.
6. Adrian Iziliaev, Gulliver Prep (Pinecrest), Sr. — (P)
Tenth in 2A at state in 16:23.9, projected at 16:24.5. Gulliver Prep projects eighth in Florida and second in 2A on its returners and did not race a soul, which is a lot of ranking built on November. Iziliaev, Emilio Perez-Garcia and Tyler Keating are the fifth-, eleventh- and fourteenth-fastest returning marks in this class and none of the three has opened.
7. Logan Haley, Suwannee (Live Oak), Jr. — (P)
Eleventh in 2A at state in 16:24.4, projecting to 16:25.0, and the one projection here with an asterisk of its own: Suwannee raced. The Bulldogs put six boys in the Cecil Field B race, led by Daniel Stoltzfoos in 18:06, and four more in the C race. Haley was not among them. His teammates ran and he did not.
That is different from a program staying home, and it usually means something. Until it means something specific, he sits at his November number.
8. Aidan Chandler, Bolles, Sr.
Twenty-second in 2A at state in 16:46.1 and one of only three 2A boys in this ten who has run in 2026. Chandler finished 38th in the Cecil Elite race in 16:28.0, eighteen seconds faster than his state time on a course where the field ran dead level with November.
The board puts him ninth, 1.3 seconds behind Aaron Ches. He is ranked eighth, ahead of Ches, on the precedent this project set in 1A: a runner who raced outranks a projection when the board number is a tie, and eighteen seconds of improvement inside the deepest race in Florida is a better piece of evidence than a nine-month-old time. Chandler was Bolles's second man behind a runner nobody expected, and he is the only returning 2A boy in this ten who ran faster in August than he did in November.
9. Aaron Ches, Jr. — (P), DNF
Twelfth in 2A at state in 16:26.1, seventh-fastest returning mark in the class, and the hardest entry on this list to place, for two separate reasons.
The first is that he did not skip opening weekend — he entered the Cecil Field Elite race and did not finish. A DNF is not a slow time. It is not evidence he has lost anything, and dropping him below runners a minute slower on his November mark would be a bigger error than the one it avoids. But it is also not nothing: he was on the line, the race happened, and there is no mark.
The second is that the Cecil entry lists him at Bolles, and the returner data has him at Episcopal (Jacksonville), with no transfer recorded. Episcopal's boys did run at Cecil, in the Elite and C races, and Ches is not among them. The most likely reading is a summer move to Bolles that postdates our returner file, but we cannot confirm it from these results, so we are not putting a school beside his name yet. Both schools are 2A, so his place in this ranking is unaffected either way — what changes is whose team he scores for, and Bolles is already first in the class.
10. Cole Galuski, Berkeley Prep (Tampa), Jr. — (P)
Fifteenth in 2A at state in 16:28.3, projecting to 16:28.9, and the last ranked spot on the cleanest break anywhere on this board: the next two names, Armaan Sharma and Emilio Perez-Garcia, are both fifteen seconds back. From Alam at fourth down to Galuski at tenth, seven runners are packed inside ten and a half seconds — and six of the seven have no 2026 time at all. That block is not really ordered. It is a queue waiting for a result.
Berkeley Prep did not race. That makes it the fourth 2A program in this top ten to hold a top-fifteen returning mark and keep it in the garage: Montverde, McKeel, Gulliver Prep and Berkeley Prep between them account for five of these ten names and zero races.
Just missed
Armaan Sharma (Bolles, So., 16:44 at Cecil) is eleventh on the board and gets his own paragraph below. Emilio Perez-Garcia (Gulliver Prep, Sr., 16:43.5), Nathaniel Sage (Edgewood, Jr., 16:50.9) and Tyler Keating (Gulliver Prep, Jr., 16:53.8) are twelfth, fifteenth and nineteenth on projection. Edgewood raced five boys in the Cecil B race without Sage, the same pattern as Suwannee and Haley.
Four raced improvements landed just outside, and they are the most interesting names in this section. Jeffery Tanner Turley (Dunedin, Sr.) was 138th in 2A at state in 18:26.2 and ran 17:28.4 for 12th in the Jim Ryun varsity race — worth 16:50 converted, a 96-second improvement. John William Martin (Fernandina Beach, Jr.) went from 18:09.3 at state to 16:52 at Cecil, 77 seconds, in the Elite race. Lawson Phillips (Florida High, So.) took 36 seconds off, 17:26.0 to 16:50. Luke LaHaye (Calvary Christian, Clearwater, Jr.) ran 16:53, 24 seconds up on November.
All four converted inside 16:53 and all four are 21 to 24 seconds behind the tenth spot, which is the honest gap. Any of them running that again in October is ranked.
Turley's 96 seconds is the largest improvement by any 2A boy who converted under 17:00, but not the largest in the class. Owen Kalshoven (Dunedin, So.) went from 21:08.5 at state to a converted 17:40 off 18:18.5 at Jim Ryun — 208 seconds — and Logan Milo (Calvary Christian, Clearwater, Jr.) went 20:56.7 to 17:36 at Cecil, 201 seconds. Those are the two biggest jumps by a 2A boy this weekend, from runners who were nowhere near the front in November, and they are the kind of result that turns into a ranking in October rather than August.
Two more new Bolles names besides Rigdon: Wyatt Cleek (Jr.) ran 16:52 in the Elite race and Vincent Barragan (Jr.) won his section of the B race in 17:00, neither with a 2025 state appearance. Bolles put six boys at 17:05 or faster, and four of the six — Rigdon, Cleek, Barragan and Luke Meiners (Jr., 17:05) — did not exist in the returner data at all.
And the hardest omissions, all five of them Bolles-adjacent or worse:
Armaan Sharma (Bolles, So.) is the closest miss on the board and the highest-placed returner left off this list. He was eighth in 2A at state in 16:21.4 as a freshman, the fourth-fastest returning mark in the class, and he ran 16:44 at Cecil, 22.6 seconds off on a course that cost the field nothing. A sophomore giving back 23 seconds in August is not alarming and is not evidence either. He is the first name in if he runs to form, and he is not ranked on a mark he had the chance to defend.
JP Bracamontes (Bolles, Sr.) was 14th in 2A at state in 16:27.4, the eighth-fastest returning mark in this class, and ran 17:56 at Cecil — 89 seconds off, 134 places behind Rigdon in the same race. Dominic Sadonis (Angeline Academy, Fr.) was 16th in 2A in 16:28.7 as an eighth grader and was fifth at the Ragin' Storm Challenge in 17:27.7, worth 17:29 on a course that grades within a second and a half of Cecil — a full minute off. Henry Camp (Bolles, Sr., 16:54.2 at state) ran 17:18 and Dominic Martinez (Frostproof, Jr., 17:06.0 at state) ran 18:03 at Jim Ryun, worth 17:25.
All five are top-twenty returning marks in 2A. None is ranked, and none is written off. They are the Lucas Latimore case from the 1A list: too good to leave out on merit, with no argument for being ranked on a time they had a chance to defend and did not.
Three of the five are Bolles runners, and that is the strangest thing on this list. Five Bolles returners entered the Cecil Elite race. One — Aidan Chandler — improved. One — Aaron Ches — did not finish. The other three ran 23, 24 and 89 seconds below their state marks, while two boys with no state history at all finished ahead of every one of them. The same split, almost exactly, shows up in the Bolles girls' race.
Method notes
- 406 Class 2A boys have a mark on the board, either an opening-weekend race or a 2025 state time. 148 of them are returners from the 2025 state meet.
- The boys' August-to-November conversion is +0.6 seconds off the 158 runners who ran both Cecil Field and the state meet. August times and state times are directly comparable on this side. The girls' equivalent is +28.8 off 173.
- Course offsets against Cecil Field, boys, as carried in the ranker: Jim Ryun (Holloway Park) +38.2, Pine Forest +61.8, Dueling Summits +56.4, Spikes & Spurs +27.8, Lecanto +22.1, Ragin' Storm −1.4, Ocoee −3.0, Lehigh −19.6, Lemon Bay −23.6. Only four of them touch this list: Cecil, Pine Forest, Jim Ryun and Ragin' Storm.
- Sample sizes behind the ones that matter here: Cecil is the anchor, Jim Ryun 39 runners, Ragin' Storm 22, Lehigh 19, Ocoee 10, Pine Forest 5. Recomputing Jim Ryun off this weekend's data gives a mean of +43.2 rather than the +38.2 carried, which moves Turley from 16:50 to 16:45 and changes nobody's placement. Pine Forest is the only one where the gap between the carried figure and the data is large enough to break a ranking.
- Pine Forest is treated as unrated in this list. Its five-runner sample spans −24.6 to +142.5, four of the five run for Pensacola Catholic, and it includes the athlete it would be applied to. The offset carried in the ranker (+61.8) and the recomputed mean (+53.2) both need to be replaced or dropped before week 2; the choice moves Frederick Gunther between second and tenth in this class.
- Class is 2026-27 FHSAA classification, not 2025-26. Every 2A school named here carries the same classification it held last season; none changed.
- Unclassed August names were checked against the top ten cutoff of 16:28.9. Three Florida runners from schools with no classification in this data ran faster: Jaxon Kiper (Strawberry Crest), Landon Watkins (Sickles) and Ryder Dempsey (Geneva Classical Academy). The first two are large public schools well outside 2A. Geneva Classical Academy, Lakeland, sent nobody to the 2025 state meet and so carries no class here; its 16:43 at Jim Ryun (16:04.8 converted) is not ranked and should be checked against the 1A list once the classification is confirmed.
- School-slug warning: three different Calvary Christians appear in this weekend's results — Clearwater, Fort Lauderdale and Fort Walton Beach — and all three normalize to one key. Fort Walton Beach is not in the returner data and was inheriting Clearwater's 2A classification. No Fort Walton runner posted a time near this top ten, so the rankings are unaffected, but the alias map needs all three separated before week 2.
- Roster warning: Aaron Ches appears at Bolles in the Cecil Field results and at Episcopal (Jacksonville) in the returner data, with no transfer recorded. Both are 2A. His class ranking is unaffected; his team is not settled.
The 2A girls list is here, and the full opening-weekend recap, including all eleven meets, is here.
Frequently Asked Questions
How were these Class 2A boys cross country rankings calculated? expand_more
Every opening-weekend time from August 21-22, 2026 is converted to a Cecil Field equivalent using the runners who raced both a given course and the 2025 FHSAA state meet. Runners who did not open are entered at their 2025 state time plus 0.6 seconds and marked (P). Schools are slotted into their 2026-27 FHSAA classification, not their 2025-26 one.
Why is Will Moss ranked first in Class 2A without racing? expand_more
Moss won the 2025 2A state title in 15:35.3, 42.5 seconds clear of the next returning boy in the class, and Montverde Academy entered no meet on either day of opening weekend. Even projected forward with no summer improvement credited, he is 28 seconds ahead of the fastest 2A mark anybody ran on a course that converts cleanly.
Who is Brantley Rigdon and why is he ranked second? expand_more
Rigdon is a Bolles junior with no 2025 state appearance who does not exist in the returner data at all. He finished 19th in the Cecil Field Elite race in 16:04.0, the deepest boys field in Florida, ahead of Bolles's entire returning top four. It is the fastest 2A mark of the weekend on the anchor course, with no conversion needed.
Why is the Pine Forest Invitational course conversion thrown out? expand_more
The Pine Forest offset rests on five runners whose gaps against their own state times span 167 seconds, from minus 24.6 to plus 142.5. Four of the five run for Pensacola Catholic, and one of them is Frederick Gunther, the athlete the correction would be applied to. Leaving him out, the remaining estimates value his 16:57.2 anywhere from 15:45 to 16:25, a range wide enough to move him from second to tenth.
Which Class 2A boys team ranks first in Florida? expand_more
Bolles, which is also fourth in the state overall. Its Cecil Field five averaged 16:37.6 inside a 56-second spread, led by Brantley Rigdon and Aidan Chandler. Gulliver Prep is second in 2A and eighth in Florida entirely on projection, having entered no runner anywhere on opening weekend.