Brooke Wilson just ran one of the best cross-country races in U.S. schoolgirl history
And in New Hampshire, two new runners established themselves as all-time in-state greats
The Colorado and New Hampshire state-championship meets were held on Saturday. I previewed what I considered to be the premium action in both places. But even if I hadn’t done this and had decided only now to write about the explosive elements that emerged from these thirteen girls’ and thirteen’ boys’ races, my points of focus would be the same.
The girls’ Colorado 5A State Championship was destined to be special, as among the twenty teams in the field were five four teams ranked in Milesplit’s national top-25 and a sixth fifth that had beaten #14 Arapahoe at the 5A Region 2 Championships one week earlier. I predicted that this unranked team, Mountain Vista, would beat all five four ranked teams and “steal” the 5A State Championship.
That didn’t happen, but Mountain Vista did claim a distant second to Air Academy (results). The numbers in blue correspond to Milesplit’s most recent nationwide rankings.
But who cares about team championships? Valor Christian senior Brooke Wilson became the first girl under seventeen minutes at the Norris Penrose Events Center with a 16:59.2, shattering Brie Oakley’s course record of 17:07.8 from the 2017 5A State Champs. In avenging a one-second loss at regionals to Air Academy’s Bethany Michalak (who was more than a minute behind her on Saturday), she won the race by 24 seconds.
The course at Norris Penrose has been used for the state meet since, I believe, the 2015 season, so great Colorado high-school runners such as Elise Cranny never got to test themselves there. But the updated all-time list includes some notable names.
(Don’t ignore that 17:10 from junior Isabel Allori out of 3A the other day, whatever that advisory might translate to.)
The base elevation of Norris Penrose is just over 6,000’, imposing close to a 4.0-percent penalty in relation to sea level. I have never been there, but the course is described as more difficult than most, especially since so many high-school championship meets are now held on runway-style courses that might as well be convoluted tracks.
Applying the 4-percent altitude factor converts Wilson’s time to 16:20. That would make her among the fastest girls of all time with Jenna Hutchins the first to dip under 16:00 on turf last autumn in 2020. (Nobody seems to mention this, but supershoes have clearly made a difference for some kids on some cross-country courses.)
Hutchins ran her 15:58 on a flat course at the Garmin RunningLane Championships Alabama. How much faster might Wilson’s time have been on a similar sea-level course?
Look at the duplicate names on the above lists. Katie Rainsberger went from 17:39 at Norris Penrose (not pushed) to 16:23 at RunningLane. Riley Stewart dropped from 17:20 to 16:28. And on the boys’ side, last year’s 4A champion, Niwot’s Zane Bergen, parlayed his 15:17 at Norris Penrose into a 14:08 at RunningLane, finishing fourth behind three Newbury Park freaks and dipping under the national “record” broken moments before by Colin Sahlman.
Wilson clearly has the chops to go under 16 minutes on the right course. And she appears to be trending in a rosy direction, as states was only her fourth race of the season, and her time on the far faster Liberty Bell invitational course in September was a comparatively dawdling 16:53.
The only thing I will say about the boys’ 5A race is that nationwide #23 Valor Christian won the title, and the VC boys would have been a better team if Brooke Wilson—who does, after all, attend the same school—had run for them instead of the girls. If she had done this and duplicated her 16:59, it would have made her the VC boys’ fourth runner.
Very few girls have ever been capable of cracking the top seven, let alone the top five, of a top-25 boys’ team. This is an incredible scenario no matter how it’s created, but in this case, what created it is what cost the VC boys a regional title: They have a great top three and then a precipitous drop-off. This didn’t kill them Saturday, but it will at the Nike Southwest and Garmin RunningLane meets if they go.
In 4A (results), the #2-in-the-country Niwot girls did their thing, posting 20 points and staving off boredom by appointing a Summit runner to chase the entire way.
The Niwot boys didn’t win, but freshman Rocco Culpepper led the team to a second-place finish with a 10th-place 16:01, making him the fastest ninth-grader on the day by 42 seconds. (Notice in these images that “freshman” is out and “9” is in. Now if American schools would also start educating kids along with rushing to ensure that every student is offered a harmless or ad hoc classification.)
Because the New Hampshire season isn’t over yet, with the Meet of Champions on Saturday, and also because only three of the six rave videos have been uploaded, I will wait to review the state meets there in depth until I preview the Meet of Champions. But in brief, the runner I talked up with the awesome mom, Gilford’s Patrick Gandini, ran the fastest time ever by a D-III boy at Derryfield Park with a 15:28, winning the race by 1:18 (results) and earning his third straight state title.
Only three other D-III boys have gone under 16:00 at Derryfield since the course assumed its present(ish) form in 1985, and two of them did it in the same race, the 2008 D-III Championships, where Fall Mountain's Eric Malnati ran 15:34 and Mascenic’s Job Christiansen 15:54. In the 2015 Manchester Invitational, Interlakes’ Cameron Daly ran 15:52, winning the small-school race by 11 seconds. That means that these three all had at least a whiff of competition in their fastest Derryfield races.
Gandini is now the fifth-fastest ever from New Hampshire at Derryfield. Current Coe-Brown senior Aidan Cox tops that list with his 15:15 from 2020. Portsmouth’s Cory Thorne ran 15:21 at the 2004 D-I Championships; Oyster River’s Patrick O’Brien (Cathy Schiro O’Brien’s son) ran 15:24 to win the 2016 D-II Championships; and Londonderry’s John Mortimer also ran 15:24 to win the 1994 D-I Championships.
In the latter race, Mortimer beat Matt Downin of Pinkerton Academy, a school one town away, by six seconds. The next week, Downin would run another 15:30, which would be good enough to top Mortimer by three seconds. Downin and Mortimer would finish first and second, in that order, at that December’s Foot Locker National Championships. Also, Eric Jenkins’ best time here was 15:32. Ben True ran 15:17, with competition.
It’s not hard to contextualize a solo 15:28 at Derryfield Park, yet still fun to belabor the point because it justifies a short side trip through history.
In the D-II boys’ race, Lebanon’s Birhanu Harriman ran 15:31, tying him at the end of the day with Bishop Guertin’s Jeff Lacoste for #7 all-time among Granite Staters. While he won by 39 seconds, he was behind Cox for the first mile, which the suddenly lanky Coe-Brown senior reached in 4:50. But Cox’s injury issues evidently returned thereafter, and he wound up second in 16:10. Despite his difficulties, Coe-Brown showed that they are by far the best boys’ team in the state by placing five in the top ten and scoring a sparse 28 points (results).
I was guardedly optimistic about the Concord boys in the D-I race, if only because I thought all the other teams were basically terrible. I wasn’t entirely wrong about this, but Pinkerton pulled out a decisive victory with 80 points, Windham (until recently a D-II school) second with 142 points (results). Concord was sixth, meaning that they earned a spot in the Meet of Champions, but the Tide has been receding since the midpoint of the season or so, and because some of its runners post their training on Strava, it’s not hard to see why. Two of their best guys did a speed workout the day after the Capital Area Championships, in which they had gone out overly fast and faded. I try to place faith in the resilience of young legs, but they can only take so much improper stress.
However, that’s really none of my business, at least not until I write my next cross-country post, which in turn assumes no one in Boulder burns my house down in the interim.