When it comes to racing, the Princeton High boys’ cross country team keeps things simple.

“You notice on the back of shirts it says ‘run,’ we don’t need any fancy slogans,” said PHS head coach Mark Shelley. “That’s our philosophy, it is just run, trust your training.”

That philosophy came in handy as PHS competed in the Mercer County championship meet last Friday at Thompson Park in Jamesburg. With senior star Jacob Rist and sophomore standout Alex Roth sidelined with nagging injuries and senior James Cao dropping out of the race in the early going, the remaining PHS runners trusted their training and came through with a fifth place finish of 19 schools.

“I was pleased,” said Shelley, who got a 25th place finish individually from junior Noah Chen as he clocked a time of 17:34 over the 5,000-meter course with sophomore Jonathan Petrozzini taking 33rd, freshman Nick Delaney coming in 34th, and freshman Alex Ackerman placing 40th.

Shelley liked how Chen took care of business. “Noah had a tough week with some school stuff; he has had kind of an up-and-down year,” said Shelley.

“We have really talked about consistency and I was so pleased that he not only ran well but in the absence of these other guys being able to finish or run, he stuck it out.”

Sophomore Petrozzini ran surprisingly well, considering that he has been dealing with injury.

“Petrozzini wasn’t going to run and we threw him in,” said Shelley. “In the past week he has been able to do a mile or a mile and a half of hard training and it tightened up. He warmed up and said it felt OK. I said go for it. Today he was better in the second half of the race than the first half; that shows me he has been rehabbing and stretching.”

The two newcomers, Delaney and Ackerman, stretched themselves in making outstanding county debuts. “I told those two that there is always pressure,” said Shelley. “What makes you good is your ability to handle pressure.”

Shelley is confident his runners can handle the pressure of the Central Jersey Group 3 sectional meet, which is slated for November 8 at Thompson Park.

“We are really focusing on sectionals,” said Shelley. “The hardest thing about sectionals is figuring out who to run. Aidan [Donahue] and Karl [Bjorkman] didn’t run as well today but they have been much more consistent and they are older. We’ll evaluate the training over the next two weeks, there are some tough decisions to make. It is hard because you don’t want to make workouts a race ever but at the same time, we have to see who can run what interval and this kind of thing.”