New Hampshire Meet of Champions mini-preview

The girls of Hanover should finally take its 2023 turn at the top

The results of last week’s six divisional New Hampshire state meets at Derryfield Park in Manchester are easy to summarize. Bothof the Division I races were blow-outs, with Pinkerton Academy girls and Nashua South boys winning by margins of 85 and 50 points Both of the Division II races were close two-team battles between solid or very good teams, with the Oyster River girls edging Hanover by four points and Hanover’s boys landing 22 points ahead of Coe-Brown. And both of the Division III races were tight clashes as well, but between relatively weak teams, with no clear favorite heading in and no team breakouts on the day.

Eighteen boys’ and girls’ teams qualified for today’s 2023 New Hampshire Cross-Country Meet of Champions at Alvirne High School in Hudson, with the girls’ race at 2:30 p.m. EDT and the boys’ race at 3:20 p.m. Live results will appear on Lancer Timing, while videos of the races will be posted to New Hampshire Cross Country YouTube channel sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.

When I was running for Concord High—now a huge non-factor in the sport, and, perhaps owing to heavy-metal contamination of Penacook Lake, a community now unusually beset by dimwitted and caustic adults—in the late 1980s, only twelve teams of each gender qualified for the Meet of Champions: five from Division I, four from Division II, and three from Division III. Today, these numbers are seven, six, and five.

Also, if I remember right, in 1987, any runner in the top 20 of any of these races not on a qualifying team moved on to the Meet of Champions. Today, the qualification is, as with team qualifying, biased toward larger schools: 30th place is now the cut-off for D-I and 25th place is the last Meet of Champions qualifying spot for D-II, while for D-III, the money spot remains 20th.

The Meet of Champions expanding from 12 to 18 teams over the years makes sense, as the state has about 50 percent more people than it did in the 1980s. But you can see from last week’s team scores that, despite more spots now being allotted to teams and individuals from larger schools, Division I teams and individuals are still “screwed” by this system, as happens practically every fall.

The results of the D-II girls’ race were unusual in that a team managed to score 33 points and lose. The lowest number of points a team can rack up and still lose a meet is 28. This is because if two teams claim the top ten spots in a race, with each team contributing five runners to this cohort, then the total number of points must be 55 (the sum of the numbers 1 through 10 is 55) and the most even way to split the number 55 into whole numbers is to assign one team 27 points and the other 28. (It’s easier to see that the most lopsided score in such a scenario is 15-40.)

Oyster River and Hanover combined for only 62 points, meaning that the top two teams in a championship race scored only 7 points higher than the minimum possible.

You can watch this race by clicking on the image below, captured at about 900 meters in.

I can rattle of the names of a number of New Hampshire teams that have won state meets with fewer than 29 points; in fact, the 2007 Hanover girls scored only 29 at the Meet of Champions, and if I dug around a little more I think I would find one or two Coe-Brown teams that were even more dominant than that. But I doubt that any Granite State team has ever lost a state meet while scoring 33 or fewer points. Such a situation obviously requires the existence two and exactly two dominant teams while all the others in the same division are basically crap.

You can see that the top three girls’ teams today will be Oyster River, Hanover, and D-I Pinkerton, and that any of these could wind up victorious. The course at Alvirne runs maybe 30-35 seconds faster than Derryfield Park for the top boys and perhaps 40-45 seconds faster for the best. More importantly, it also punishes over-ambitious starts somewhat less than a hilly course like Derryfield does, ceteris paribus.

I think Hanover will edge out Pinkerton for the low score today, while Oyster River will finally have somewhat of an off day despite having gathered momentum throughout the fall campaign and end up third. Division I teams should easily grab the remaining three team qualifying sports for next week’s New England Interscholastic Cross-Country Championships in Belfast, Maine, with Bedford likely to prevail within this group.

On the boys’ side, I think the team comp between Coe-Brown, Nashua North, Hanover, and Pinkerton Academy will be even closer than last week’s scores suggest, and that they will finish in that order, with Londonderry and Bishop Guertin also claiming New Englands spots.

Individually, for the girls, sophomore Lea Perreard of Hanover is a clear favorite, with her strongest challenge likely to come from Fiona Lee of Bedford. And Bishop Guertin junior Matt Giardina is a similarly odds-on favorite, with only Keene sophomore Sullivan Sturtz apparently capable of hanging with Giardina when the latter is on.