New Englands: Champlain Valley's girls lead an unusually vicious horde of Vermonsters, but Oyster River (N.H.) has MASSIVE momentum

Upsets abound in cross-country running, but among the least upsetting things about them is their unpredictability

Starting shortly before noon today, the New England Interscholastic Cross-Country Championships will be held for the eighty-eighth time, at least for boys; the first girls’ New Englands wasn’t until 1977. This was a few years after Massachusetts, a state that has almost half of the region’s population (now 15.1 million), stopped participating. Although Bay State kids may never return to the event—Massachusetts is two full weeks behind every other New England state’s high-school cross-country schedule, a strange conceit in a cold-weather part of the country—the New Englands still retain a modicum of prestige.

New Hampshire Cross Country has comprehensive previews of the girls’ and boys’ races, which are scheduled for 11:30 a.m. (which is, like, now) and 12:15 p.m. respectively. What intrigues me most about both races is also of primary interest to girls’ preview author Scott Bliss: How much of a shot do the Oyster River (Durham, N.H.) girls have of beating Champlain Valley Union (Hinesburg, Vt.)?¹

Before the New Hampshire Meet of Champions a week ago, I suggested that Hanover would knock off Oyster River for the first time all year. Instead, Oyster River’s season-long momentum continued uninterrupted. The Bobcats prevailing by 20 points over Hanover, which in turn edged Pinkerton Academy by only a single point.

These three teams are an entire level above all other Granite State girls’ squads. CVU, meanwhile, is the only New England girls’ team that has earned a current nationwide by Dyestat, which placed the Redhawks at #29 in its November 9 U.S. rankings (Milesplit didn’t even have CVU in its nationwide top 50 as of November 2).

One way to compare these teams is to review the results of the Manchester (N.H.) Invitational on September 23. There, although the four teams were divided into two different races, CVU had a clear gap on closely-matched Oyster River and Hanover, with Pinkerton similarly far behind these two as a team.

How is CVU looking lately? At the 2023 Vermont State Championships two weekends ago, the Division I Redhawks’ fifth runner was the fifth-fastest girl in the entire state that day, as the D-II and D-III winners covered the Thetford Woods course in 20:33 and 20:51 respectively.

Don’t be fooled by how “slow” the team ran to accomplish this. Sure, it’s only Vermont (population ~650,000), but the Thetford Woods course is one of the most demanding high-school championship courses I’ve ever seen. People continually run their yaps about the alleged difficulty of Derryfield Park, but CVU averaged 19:12 there in late September versus 20:05 at Thetford Woods.

CVU appears to have a clear advantage in the girls’ race. But as a reminder of how fickle the sport can be even to great runners and teams, check out the results of the top Vermont teams at the Manchester Invitational…

…and compare these to the results of the Vermont State Championships:

These are some incredibly closely matched teams. Usually, on both the boys’ and girls’ sides, Connecticut—which has nearly half of the population of the five-state region represented at the modern-day New Englands—cleans the clocks of the other states when the meet is scored as five-”team” meet. It would be great to see the Vermont boys change that despite the special challenges they face as a tiny, lumberjack-style unit. It looks like the state could land four teams in the top dozen, anyway.

Individually, Ruth White of Orono, Maine is an overwhelming favorite, while Stephen Hergenrother of Ridgefield, Connecticut—the boys’ team favorite despite being knocked off by Danbury at the Connecticut State Open Championships—is considered a less-sure but favorable bet.

1. Bliss, whose years at the University of Vermont apparently overlapped with my own, is a coaching legend who in his retirement is unable to stop following and talking about Vermont high-school running.