Photo by Jake McNeill: Marshall’s Keagen Anderson holds up the Class AA state championship trophy as teammates (front row, left to right) Josh Leibfried, Landon Marthaler and Sam Deutz celebrate after the Tigers won the Class AA state title on Saturday at Les Bolstad Golf Course in St. Paul. The title marks the first for the Marshall boys cross country team since they went back-to-back in 2003 and 2004.

ST. PAUL — For the second year in a row, Marshall is bringing home some hardware from the state cross country meet. After the girls team won their first-ever state title last year with the boys taking home a third-place finish, the Marshall boys earned the 2024 Class AA state title with a runaway victory. The win marked the Marshall boys’ third overall title and first since they went back-to-back in 2003 and 2004 behind 2004 individual state champion Yahya Iman.

“I’m incredibly proud of this group. [The state championship] was their goal from the beginning of our end of last season, coming into this one,” Marshall head boys cross country coach Brian Leibfried said. “They were focused throughout the season. We had our ups and downs, but they stayed true to each other and for the team… Down the stretch, everything was for the team, and certainly their efforts today and their strategy and what they did paid off.”

Marshall won the boys state title after finishing as the Section 2AA runner-up to Mankato East on Oct. 24 by a score of 35-37. Mankato East had won each of the last two state championships, so Marshall’s win gives Section 2AA its third consecutive boys team state championship.

Coach Leibfried said that he believed the runners had a championship-or-bust mentality, but that no matter what Saturday’s results, he felt Marshall had a great season.

“To build yourself up to that is really tough. To set that as the expectation, if you don’t quite get there, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a great year. But of course, coming out and achieving it is great,” Leibfried said, adding that he thinks his team is the most veteran-heavy team in the field with six seniors and most of the runners starting as seventh- or eighth-graders. “They’ve probably run more varsity races combined as a group than any other team, triple-A, single-A or double-A, and for them to put it together on this day at this moment was really special.”

Photo by Jake McNeill: The 2024 Marshall cross country team posed with its trophy after winning the Class AA state championship at Les Bolstad Golf Course on Saturday. The team includes (front row, left to right) Jack Gunn, Ethan Bly, Josh Leibfried, Kohen Holcomb, Keagen Anderson, Landon Marthaler, Sam Deutz, (back row) assistant coach Jessica Leibfried, head coach Brian Leibfried, Corbin Leibfried, Mykel Paulsen, Liam Deutz and assistant coach David Wingert.

In Saturday’s state championship meet, Marshall finished with a team score of 73 points, beating out runner-up Perham’s 81 and third-place Mankato East’s 109. The Tigers’ 73 points marked the second-lowest score by a Class AA champion in the last six years behind 2023 Mankato East’s score of 46.

Marshall fielded a veteran roster with six of its seven runners being seniors. Sam Deutz, the lone junior, led the team’s scorers with a ninth-place finish at 15:54.7. His time and place showed growth from his sophomore year state finish of 16:39.9 to place 40th. His Saturday time was just .1 seconds shy of his time the week prior at the section meet. 

“I tried not to think about the individual that much, I was just worried about the people I needed to beat for the team to win,” Deutz said. “That’s what brought me to where I got.”

As the first Tiger down the finishing chute, Deutz was able to see the rest of his teammates cross the line. He said that he was counting the finishers as they crossed the line to try to figure out how the Tigers were stacking up, but it wasn’t until he saw assistant coach David Wingert jumping for joy that he realized that the Tigers were state champions.

“All season, it was just one goal. We just had to win,” Marshall’s Keagen Anderson said. “We were number 1 [in the coaches poll], switching between [Mankato] East and Perham, but coming into this race ranked third, it was kind of fun having that upset and winning it. Perham’s a good team, East is a really solid team, but we came out on top today.”

As a team, Marshall finished with Deutz, Landon Marthaler and Josh Leibfried each earning all-state honors. Yet, Perham had two top-10 finishers, leaving it up to Marshall’s depth to bring home the title.

Behind its three all-state finishers, the Tigers finished strong with Anderson and Kohen Holcomb closing out the meet in the top 30. The two finished right behind each other with Anderson’s 16:22.9 time good for 28th and Holcomb’s 16:23.5 rounding out Marshall’s scorers in 29th.  The two also just edged out Perham’s Carter Flatau and Brody Freeland, who finished 30th and 31st at 16:23.3 and 16:24.8.

“Me and Keagen were running together and I looked over at them and we knew that we had to go catch some people because we were down at that point,” Holcomb said, saying that he knew the Tigers were down because he heard a Perham coach telling his runners that they were up by a few points. “Once we got over that hill, we just started going and running like our life depended on it… I heard that and I knew that we needed to go finish hard.”

The strong Tiger kick from their final two scorers gave the team more than enough breathing room to slide in for the win as Perham’s final runner, Reid Wokasch, didn’t cross the line until 16:35.6 for 43rd place.

Josh Leibfried was Marshall’s top finisher in 2023, placing 12th in the state meet at 16:09.4. In his senior season, however, he battled injuries such as shin splints all season long. He didn’t come within 15 seconds of his time in last year’s state championship all season and most of his times during the year were more than 30 seconds slower. 

Yet, after racing a time of 17:23.7 in the section championship on Oct. 24, Leibfried locked in and fought through the pain for his final cross country meet as a Tiger. His time of 16:16.9 was his fastest time of the year by 11 seconds and earned him a 20th-place finish, good for All-State.

“I was running through the pain, but I just wanted to do it for my team so I powered through,” Leibfried said, adding that he spent plenty of time resting, icing and going through mental preparation exercises to get himself ready to leave it all out on the course at the state meet.

Perham had two of the top eight runners. Bjorn Anderson’s time of 15:16.4 putting him behind only individual champion Salvador Wirth’s 15:15.0 for Annandale. Perham’s Matt Jorgenson also placed eighth for Perham, beating out Deutz by just a few tenths of a second at 15:54.4.

Landon Marthaler was Marshall’s No. 2 runner in the meet at 16:13.3, good for 17th place. The performance marked a 22-second improvement from his 36th-place state meet finish as a junior.

“We worked all year for this… This was our goal from the start and we really wanted to win,” Marthaler said. “It’s pretty special because we’re the fastest group in Marshall history, our coach said. We’ve all worked together for the last four or five years, so it’s just very cool to get here.”

Marshall runners said across the board that state title aspirations were on their minds after last year’s podium finish. 

“We knew that was our goal coming into it, but we didn’t know if it was realistic back in ninth or 10th grade,” Holcomb said. “Coming into this year, we knew that we could do it. We knew this team was capable of it.”

Anderson attributed this year’s team’s ability to break through the mold to its chemistry. 

“We had no doubts. It was just a team thing, and we all have goals and we had one team goal that was just to win,” Anderson said. “The team thing is that it’s a small town, you’re all close, we’re all in the same class or the same school and do the same things. We’ve just got that camaraderie.”

This group of Tigers has seen success before, but this level is new for them all. While they’ve watched their girls counterparts take home the state title last year and finished with section and state hardware before, none of the runners on the boys team were alive the last time Marshall brought home a boys state title.

“There’s a lot that goes into this, and a number of people to thank. It would be an endless list,” coach Leibfried said. “We’re 20 years out from the last time the Marshall boys won state, and with the girls last year, it gives everybody hope that you can do it just by seeing it come through. I’m just really happy for the team.”

Marshall’s Ethan Bly and Jack Gunn also ran the meet, with Bly placing 110th out of 160 runners at 17:25.5 and Gunn placing 138th at 17:54.9. 

In addition to Marthaler, Leibfried, Anderson, Holcomb, Bly and Gunn, the team also graduates senior Mark Rabaey.