New England kids have a variety of paths to the New England Championships
Two these paths bypass state-championship meets altogether. WHAAA???
This Saturday, the New Hampshire Meet of Champions will take place at Oyster River High School in Durham, with the boys’ and girls’ non-final entry lists already posted. This is a non-scoring meet that might not exist were it not for the New England Championships held annually on the second Saturday of June. The purpose of the “MoC” is to select six athletes in each individual event and six teams in each of the three relay events to advance to the New Englands. These six athletes, as some know, are not selected at random.
If I continue to usually remember what month it is, I’ll probably post a reminder about the free livestream sometime before Saturday afternoon.
Getting to the New Hampshire MoC used to require placing among the top athletes in the three divisional state meets held one week earlier. Now, however, I believe that athletes who fail to advance to the MoC from a state meet on placement—either because they underperform at states or don’t run the event in question—can use a sufficiently fast, high, or far regular-season mark to claim at at-large MoC berth, which wasn’t the case when I was a New Hampshire high-school runner.
The other five New England states employ different schemes for getting runners to the New Englands. If you’ve read this far, you’re positively interested in knowing the basics of what these are, so:
Connecticut
The Nutmeg State isn’t really a part of New England; just ask how many people in its southwestern part how upset they are that the Celtics were hosed and bounced from the playoffs at home by Miami yesterday. Still, its trees are extremely pretty in the fall, and this helps Connecticut achieve a level of consonance with its neighbors to the north and east.
Today and tomorrow, Connecticut is staging its five divisional meets. The results of the Class LL, L, MM, M, and S meets are linked on the CIAC Sports track and field page. The top athletes from these meets will advance to the Connecticut State Open Meet on Monday, June 5.
Younger high-school boys are at a considerable physical disadvantage compared to older ones. So, even with the advent of high-level middle-school programs since I was a lad, while you’ll occasionally see literally phenomenal outliers such as Patrick Gandini, it’s unusual to see freshman and sophomore boys essentially carrying, say, an entire league or conference.
Check out the results of the distance races at the Berkshire League Championships in Litchfield on May 20.
A total of 16 kids competed in the boys’ 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter races. Of these, 4 were seniors, 3 were juniors, 3 were sophomores, and 6 were freshmen. And as you can see, the seniors had little competitive impact on these races. Since today’s seniors were freshmen in the spring of 2020 when everything was canceled, maybe a sizable fraction of the graduating class of 2023 just gave up, not just in Connecticut but nationwide, on extracurriculars they were already on the fence about.
Not only was the winner of both of these races, Kyle McCarron of Housatonic High, a sophomore, but he had to beat a freshman, Ben Schildgen, who to that point was undefeated on the season to do get those wins. That’s great, but now McCarron has to spend two more years beating back a younger kid and hoping he doesn’t become 6’ 9”. Maybe they both will. But the real lesson is that McCarron was undistinguished as a freshman himself, running 11:17 for 3,200 meters.
If I lived in Connecticut, given that the state is renowned (at least by me) for the eager participation of its housewife class in white-guilt seminars and everything associated with such virtue-bellowing, I would encourage the coaches there to have their distance runners play “Karen tag” on days designated for fartlek. The idea would be to run through Boulder-esque neighborhoods knocking on doors and trying to get signatures from people who were vaccine-injured or don’t want transgender policies ruining sports for girls. Videos of these episodes would be taken and “leaked” to Beck of the Pack for uploading and raucous analysis.
But I don’t live there. So if you happen to, don’t go getting any funny ideas and attributing them to garbage you read here. But if you happen see Kyle McCarron, please congratulate him for his fourth-place finish and new PR (4:34.36) in the 1,600 meters at the Class S state meet, a performance he turned in within the hour.
Maine
Also not part of New England north of a certain dangerously inbred, ill-defined line, the Pine Tree State will hold Class A, B, and C (as easy, when you think about it, as 1, 2, and 3) championship meets on Saturday.
Maine features the winner of last fall’s New England Cross-Country Championships, Ruth White of Orono High, who has thrown down 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter performances of 5:00 and 10:33 this season.
Massachusetts
The Bay State is doing something a little different this year. Instead of having a one-day MIAA All-State Championships, it has rebranded this as the Massachusetts Meet of Champions and turned it into a two-day affair with a one-day break. This meet will start on Thursday and conclude on Saturday.
Massachusetts used the same scheme—three days including a rest day—for its six divisional state meets, which took place over the past weekend. In Division I, junior Paul Bergeron of Westford Academy split 4:30-4:21 en route to an 8:51.88 two-mile, equal to 8:48.6 for 3,200 meters and 1.06 seconds shy Chris Barnicle’s state record from 2004.
Unbelievably, the two-mile record for the MIAA All-State Championships/Meet of Champions is “only” 9:00.0 and has stood since 1975, the year before the Denver Nuggets entered the National Basketball Association. The kid who set that record, Alberto Salazar of Weymouth High, has since become known for doing other things.
The Nuggets have just reached the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history. If that’s not a sign Salazar’s mark will fall on Thursday, nothing is. And Bergeron isn’t the only kid capable of running not only under 9:00 but under 8:50—watch for Sam Burgess of Framingham, too.
If you’re chronically interested in Massachusetts youth running, bookmark BaystateRunning.com. Stephen Mazzone does an excellent job of covering the high-school happenings in a state with almost seven million people.
Rhode Island
Rhode Island is one of only four states that eschew the 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter races in high-school outdoor track. One of those, Massachusetts, has stuck with the one-mile and two-mile since the days Paul Revere himself was used as a pacing light. The other three—New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont—go with the 1,500 meters and the 3,000 meters.
Although Rhode Island is holding a state-championship meet on Saturday, it is also staging a New England qualifying meet on Tuesday, June 6. That’s four days before the New Englands and I’m mystified as to why the track lords in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations have elected to do this.
Vermont
The Green Mountain State, which has fewer people than the city of Denver, is running a play similar to Rhode Island’s, only even stranger: The state has already held its New Englands qualifying meet, but its state championships are yet to unfold.
Here’s all you need to know:
Furthermore, if you scan the results of Vermont’s New Englands qualifier, you’ll see that even though the New Englands will feature 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter races, the officials still went with the 1,500 meters and the 3,000 meters in Essex Junction. If nothing else it would have made it easier on the New Englands seeding committee (a governing body I just invented) to go with the longer, standard distances.