New Hampshire high-school cross-country: Now, then, and half a century ago
Following three timelines at once is easy provided they move forward at the same speed
High-school cross-country has been underway since before Labor Day in most states. Colorado hosted a spate of invitationals on the weekend of August 20, which seems obscene, but out here kids start school in mid-August after wrapping up the previous academic campaign in mid-May.
In my home state of New Hampshire, the school calendar is shifted forward by a couple of weeks and with it the school-sports schedule. Kids in Concord, where I grew up, started school on August 31. In my student days, we always started a day or two after Labor Day, i.e.,, as late as the second week in September. Concord High’s first meet this fall was the Cofrin Classic on Tuesday, September 6, the day after Labor Day (results). At least one invitational was held elsewhere in New Hampshire in late August.
The Cofrin Classic is named after George “Rusty” Cofrin, who coached the boys’ team at Concord High starting in 1984—my freshman year, when I was brand-new to running and coaches—and ending with his retirement around ten years ago. His tenure as boys’ coach did not include every year between 1984 and whenever he retired; among the missing seasons was 1987, my senior year. Why he excluded himself during my final campaign—choosing to coach the CHS girls despite our team being favored to win a state title—is a straightforward enough story for another post, but for now I will admit to having had a solid, if indirect and largely uncredited, role in Coach Cofrin’s temporary transition.
I mentioned recently—if not here, somewhere, or at least I think so—that I’m doing some editing work on a book manuscript. Much of this pertains to the New Hampshire cross-country scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Concord boys were drawing close to the end of a dynastic period that saw the Crimson Tide claim eight state titles and four New England championships in a nine-year span (1962 through 1970). The end of this giddy stretch marked what would be the approximate midpoint of Bill Luti’s coaching career, wonderfully documented in a free 2015 e-book by Bob Estabrook. Coach Luti died in December 2019 at the age of ninety-eight. It also signaled the approximate onset of my extrauterine life, which formally commenced less than fifteen days before the sixties ended.
I don’t have any tangible evidence I ever ran cross-country or was in high school at all; whatever ribbons, trophies, and newspaper clippings I ever bothered keeping are long gone. But I do have a strong memory for the granular details of every cross-country season I took part in, and because it’s easy to call up a calendar from 1987, I can establish with some certainty the dates and outcomes of a lot of that fall’s races.
For example, I’m almost certain that the 1987 Alumni Meet, a now-abandoned Friday afternoon tradition that was always Concord’s first race of the season and was thus much-anticipated despite counting officially for nothing, was held on September 11. I remember intentionally tying for second place in this non-scoring with Chris Basha—who would go on to set a state-championship record in the 1,600 meters the following spring—in a time of 16:57 on the challenging White Park course and both of us catching heat for this from various sources for inane reasons. I also remember learning on that day exactly how to determine early in a cross-country race whether I was going to beat Basha based on his responses to simple things I did, another nugget for later (I’m planning to write extensively about cross-country in the months to come). I remember watching rat-tail-sporting future Central Mass Striders teammate and friend Dave Dunham set a state 5K road record (14:08.8) the next morning at the Bud Light Couples race in Concord Heights, not nearly as elegant a neighborhood as it may sound.
I’m pretty sure we didn’t have another meet until heading to Keene eleven days later, on Tuesday, September 22. This makes sense because that meet was unquestionably four days before the Manchester Invitational, which has been on the last Saturday in September since its inception in the mid-1970s. I know for sure that Keene had a weak team, and that its flat course was supposedly 3.3 miles long. I ran the course in 17:00, and although I beat Basha by an unlikely 30 seconds and everyone else in the race by at least a minute, I remain confident to this day that I didn’t average 5:06 per mile out there.
In the ensuing days, I developed a cold and ran poorly at the Manchester Invitational. taking 15th after finishing 10th as a junior despite running ten seconds faster. But we had three of the top eighteen finishers and wound up third behind Division 2 schools Oyster River (featuring future running-book author Matt Fitzgerald) and Stevens. We beat Essex Junction of Vermont, which would go on to win the New England Championships at Wickham Park in Connecticut less than two months later.
In those days, the Manchester Invitational was considered a big deal. But it only had four races—boys’ and girls’ varsity and junior-varsity races. I believe there were close to 35 teams in my race, including representatives from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. But 1980s “big” is different from "big” almost forty years later. The event has expanded over the years into an all-day affair that included an open race for members of the community, along with a ninth-grade 2.1-mile race, a large-school varsity race, a small-school varsity race, a junior-varsity race, and a sub-junior-varsity race for both boys and girls. Millennium Running has been handling the results since 2009, and for years has been providing real-time results.
You may have noticed by this point that today is the last Saturday in September, meaning that the 2022 Manchester Invitational is being held today. NewHampshireCrossCountry.com’s event preview is here, and you can expect race videos to begin peppering its YouTube channel starting sometime on Sunday, maybe even on Saturday evening.
Fifty-odd years ago, there was almost no such thing as an invitational at the high school level, at least not in New England. This made dual meets between highly touted teams a source of intense focus, as these represented the only chance key individuals had to go head-to-head before the state championship meet. I am reading verifiable stories about hundreds of spectators showing up to watch Division I Concord High race crosstown Division 2 rival Bishop Brady at a time when those two teams are among the six-state region’s best—and when Coach Luti’s son was BBHS’s top runner. I would coach at Bishop Brady myself for a few seasons starting in 1999, an experience I wrote about for Running Times in 2001 (Runner’s World inherited the article when it purchased Running Times for a song, or maybe a stanza, from Cruella de Ville’s most devoted real-life protege around fifteen years ago; the current version is missing the scanned photos I supplied to Running Times in 2001.)
By the time I started running, dual meets had become somewhat de-emphasized with the appearance of more invitational meets and an increased willingness among more teams to travel greater distances to participate in these. Also, at Concord High, a longstanding tradition dictated that on meet days (or Fridays before Saturday meets) the number-one runner for Concord at the team’s most recent meet wear the long-sleeve maroon-and-white T-shirt provided by the school with “TIDE HARRIERS #1” on it, with the other varsity runners sporting the appropriate shirt all the way down to #7.
This tradition promulgated needless intra-squad rivalries, especially on the Concord teams of the mid- to late 1980s. In 1986, my junior year—when I ran second or third most of the time on a state runner-up team—one of the captains essentially put paid to this practice by refusing to surrender the #1 shirt to Basha upon losing to him, eternally claiming (accurately, I’m sure) that it hadn’t been washed yet. No one on the team really gave a shit, but the cascade of inaccurate jerseys and the lazy defiance underlying the scuttling of proper order helped Coach Cofrin develop a healthy distaste for that captain and most of the other seniors on the 1986 squad.
Nowadays, the dual meet has been all but obliterated in New Hampshire. With invitationals now run on almost every weekend of the season, there almost isn’t room. From what I can gather, most teams have two- to four-team meets on Tuesdays, but their coaches choose to either substitute junior-varsity runners for most or all of their usual top seven or have their varsity runners hold back. I like that this kind of discipline has inevitably taken root at the prep level in accordance with this structure. It’s funny to think how out for blood most kids were in dual meets in the 1980s, even if most of the better teams had coaches wise enough to discourage the practice.
This year, the Concord boys have their weakest team in maybe ten years. At the moment, the Tide’s number-one runner is a freshman named Josiah Conley. This kid had a 100-mile week in mid-August (evidence) and followed that up with 90 the next week. This will be an interesting fellow to watch.
As I work my way through the manuscript and follow the 2022 New Hampshire high-school campaign, I’ll be superimposing some memories from my own years in that environment, focusing mainly on the up-and-down 1987 season. I also intend to watch the Colorado State Championships in person for the first time, as I don’t think I’ll be going to New Hampshire—or anywhere requiring me to board an airplane—this fall. When I get to writing about this stuff, it flows very naturally even when the words don’t; done the right way, these regular releases about cross-country might even make me and everyone reading forget that the same person writing them regularly churns out excoriating screeds about almost everything else he sees.
In this is an idea for a weekly subscriber-only post that focuses on my own running and how events in my life have affected and transformed it over the years. I have claimed repeatedly here that I wouldn’t paywall any of my posts, but what I meant is that I wouldn’t paywall anything I write about other people or my perspectives on general events. Whether I go forward with this depends on my overall plans for the fall, which are solidifying quickly. But I feel as if paying subscribers should get something other people don’t as long as I keep the usual shit flowing through the Beck of the Pack sewer main.