2023 New England High-School Championships video links, plus spoilers buried so far below these videos that it's your own fault if they actually spoil a damn thing
2023 New England High-School Championships video links, plus spoilers buried so far below these videos that it's your own fault if they actually spoil a damn thing
If I put anything pertinent here I'm afraid I'll say too much
The title of my post this morning (or yesterday morning, for some of you) probably should have included the word “preview,” but since the races discussed are over, there’s no point in fixing it now; anyone I incidentally tricked into thinking the 2023 New England Interscholastic Cross-Country Championships had already concluded has been victimized for life, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now besides pray, send good vibes, complain, and sullenly revisit the site from time to time.
The crew of informed and lively microphone-armed pundits from New Hampshire Cross Country (a site now under the expanding banner of StateRunning.net) traveled to Belfast, Maine—far enough from Dublin, New Hampshire to dispel most pre-race anxieties about Molotov cocktails being slung around the course—to issue remarks on the girls’ and boys’ races while these competitions were in progress. These videos were edited and uploaded to YouTube with startling speed, even for these slavering running-obsessives; the fellas must have done this work on the way home to New Hampshire from inside the cab of the enormous pickup truck Tim Cox drives to and from events, always comfortably under some posted speed limits and with few to no abrupt and declarative lane changes.
For obvious reasons, I would dedicate disproportionate focus on New Hampshire running even if only a sliver of subscribers to this newsletter also lived or hailed from there. But I will continue to insist that anyone would likes using the Internet to watch high-school cross-country runners race will find these videos—produced entirely as labors of running love and always available for free—to be of unusually high quality for the genre. This would be the case even were the genre laden with wizards of footrace-event capture and distribution. There are functioning cameras situated at an unlikely number of points between the start and the finish, and whatever trace preparation or knowledge deficits this group of pundits has, they more than atone for with pleasantly unrefined Yankee humor.
The videos below are presented in the order the events depicted occurred. Below these two embeds are photos that add no useful information but serve as a buffer. The purpose of this buffer, and to some extent of the very words I’m typing now, is to hamper accidental viewing of the words toward the bottom of this post that one could only confidently write after having viewed both races. Classically, these bits of intrusively drama-dampening data are known as “spoilers.”
This is a strong exhortation to watch the videos before or even without examining the material below them. I always say this because I am convinced that the work these people do, some of it uncommonly sly, can turn attentive kids who already like running into older kids and adults who love running so much they refuse to stop doing it and urging others to do embrace it as a lifestyle.
Executive summaries of the races:
New Hampshire girls’ teams performed exceptionally well, claiming three of the top five places (results). That’s two more than any one state “deserves”; since five states participate in the “New Englands,” if all the teams sorted themselves at random. each state would have one of its teams in the top five places, one in places six through ten, and so on. Oyster River (Durham) didn’t quite challenge Champlain Valley Union of Vermont for the win, but coming within 33 points of a top-30-in-the-nation team is a great achievement, and not one of the Bobcats’ top five runners is graduating next spring.
The individual winner for the third year in a row, with a predictably yawning expanse of empty turf behind her for the last two miles of the race, was Ruth White of Orono, Maine, bound for Boise State University next fall.
The boys’ race saw Connecticut teams (results) take the top three spots with ease, with Ridgefield perhaps exceeding the expectations of even a team ranked #28 in the U.S. by Dyestat. With 57 points to runner-up Danbury’s 181, Ridgefield would have won by 60 points even had its sixth runner been included in the scoring, and would have lost by only 10 points had the places of its entire top seven counted.
Ridgefield featured the individual winner as well, Princeton-bound Steven Hergenrother, whose 15:21 put him 15 seconds up on Isaac Mahler of William Hall (West Hartford, Conn.). While the layout in Belfast is described as fast, it was not fast for the 2023 New Englands owing to some mud on the course, and the boys, who went second, seemed to be experiencing an even more chewed-up version of the loop than the girls just had for some reason. That Hergenrother ran 14:52 at the Great American Cross-Country Festival in early October and Mahler is a 9:06 3,200-meter kid implies that these kids had to work far harder than it may have looked when you were studying the video.
The most remarkable aspect of the boys’ race, however—and you already somehow know this, too—is that the officials decided to halt it after the leaders had covered at least 200 meters, apparently because some kids wiped out. This is a poor excuse for restarting a cross-country race. In fact, at the 1987 New Englands in Wickham Park outside Hartford, I saw a whole row of kids go down like dominoes, maybe seven or eight from multiple teams, hit the grass in the first hundred meters, and no one stopped fuck-all. It was also famously cold that day, and there was absolutely no way they were going to gather two hundred of us back into standing positions for even five seconds unless war broke out. Which even then would have been a stupid decision.
I’m pretty sure a few of those fallen kids simply never got up, and many Dicksicles were made in the bitter winds that day over the course of sixteen or seventeen cruel minutes. I recall the ground being exceedingly hard considering it had vegetation on it, a fact I registered whenever one of my feet would strike it from above. Hard enough to turn someone’s lights out for good, I’ll wager. There was at least one nurse on hand at the meet, but she was on our team bus, trying to catch some winks. We just dealt in those days with the scenarios we were given even when both nature and the adults in out midst forsook us, then later capriciously bolstered or invented key details of those scenarios for weak comic effect.
Whatever actually happened in Belfast today ((or yesterday) may have affected some of those boys’ races more than it did others, so when I get around to reviewing these results in more detail, and comparing them to the results of the Colorado State Championships held two weeks ago, I’ll report what I have learned about the restart or, failing that, what I suspect or merely wish to be true. For example, rumor actually has it that a brown bear did its business on the course shortly before the start, an event that troubled none of the officials and spectators because most were Mainers, and a handful of kids slipped in the mess and suffered tumbles. But at this point, we can only report either what we know or what we feel like—nothing else.