NXN: Addison Ritzenhein becomes national champion, but Niwot settles for #2 in a Colorado sweep of the girls' team medals
NXN: Addison Ritzenhein becomes national champion, but Niwot settles for #2 in a Colorado sweep of the girls' team medals
Niwot boys place #5 despite being at at-large team and posting a subpar effort in Portland
That settles that, sort of.
It was fitting that the girls’ individual race at the 2023 Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) came down to a close race between two runners with a clean gap on the rest of the field, as the teams these girls represented also blew away the other 20 squads assembled in Portland today.
All season long, I’ve been marveling about how uncommonly good the current roster of Colorado girl harriers is compared to everyone else in the country. If anything, I underestimated and undersold what these girls would produce once they raced the nation’s best at season’s end.
Addison Ritzenhein, a sophomore at Niwot High School (just northeast of Boulder, Colorado), completed the rain-soaked route on Glendoveer Golf Course in 17:10.4, six seconds ahead of Bethany Michalak of Air Academy of Colorado Springs. Emily Wisniewski of Crescent Valley High School (Corvallis, Oregon) was a distant third in 17:37.4, but she earned her podium spot, edging out Isabel Allori of Liberty Commons High School (Fort Collins, Colorado) for the bronze medal by less that a tenth of a second (results).
Air Academy and Niwot entered the race having established themselves as far and away the two best teams in the country. But despite being about 100 miles apart and in the same state, the teams hadn’t raced each other all season. Both easily won state championships, but Air Academy’s girls earned their wreath in the 5A race while Niwot’s romped to theirs in the 4A race.
The Kadets of Air Academy edged Niwot by 11 points (results), with the two teams’ combined point total being 30 points lower than that of the third-place team. And in a mild surprise that continued its momentum from the NXN Southwest race two weeks ago, U.S. #6 Mountain Vista High School of Highlands Ranch, Colorado (competing as Denver) wound up third. Not bad for a team that was fifth at its own divisional state meet.
Homes in the state of Colorado will thus soon contain five of the six medals awarded to girls at NXN today. Had Allori run a tenth of a second faster, it would have been a clean sweep. Colorado girls wound up taking 12 of the top 50 places (and, if you can tolerate an even more impressive level of dominance at the expense of having to interpret a more unusual ratio, 16 of the top 57 places). Colorado girls spread across the three aforementioned Centennial State teams also secured 14 of the top 25 places in the team scoring.
In the boys’ race, JoJo Jourdon of Olympus High School (Salt Lake City) was an appropriate victor (results) as the state of Utah left a similar, if less impactful, Rocky Mountain stamp on this competition as Colorado did on the distaff side. Though Jourdon was on hand as a solo flier, Utah teams took the two loftiest podium spots, as Herriman High School bested American Fork High School by 17 points, 83-100 (results).
American Fork had narrowly beaten Harriman at the Utah 6A State Championships (33-39), with Jourdon the winner of the 5A race. The Forkers (not their real nickname, as far as I know) had defeated Harriman even more decisively at NXN Southwest on November 18, 79-121. In that race, Forker Daniel Simmons, widely regarded as the top prep harrier in the country, beat Jourdon by 10 seconds for the individual win. Today, Simmons was “only” 13th, though that was good enough for the first finish by a team-associated runner (the boys’ and girls’ races each featured 22 teams—about 154 runners—along with 50 individual competitors).
Adding to the full-to-bursting scrapbook chronicling the feats of Colorado high-school harriers this autumn, Niwot’s boys wound up in fifth despite being one of the four teams in the race that failed to earn at automatic berth at NXN Nationals in their regional races. “Despite” is really an inapt word here, given the éclat Colorado bound-abouts have displayed this season at every local, state, and regional opportunity. But the Cougars didn’t even run as well as they typically do, with a larger-than-usual gap between its first and fifth runners.
Notable freshman watch: Marcelo Mantecon of Belen Jesuit Prep in Miami—the fourth-place team today—was 23rd overall. Mantecon was about nine seconds behind 11th-place finisher Byron Grevious of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and four seconds ahead of 29th-place Steven Hergenrother of Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, two New Englanders whose chops I’ve been agitating about all season.
In another pattern I keep hammering away at, the top 25 boys today were separated by only 22.0 seconds, while the corresponding gap on the girls’ side was 61.4 seconds. The gap between Ritzenhein and the third-place girl (26.0 seconds) was smaller than the gap between Jourdon and the boy who finished 35th, whose name I can’t even find.
Next week’s Foot Locker Finals in San Diego will seem like something of a denouement. The Foot Locker West Regionals were today at Mt. SAC in Walnut, California (girls’ results, boys’ results [link fixed]), Payton Meineke of Riverdale Ridge High School in Colorado, who qualified for NXN Nationals at Foot Locker Southwest two weeks ago and for the Foot Locker Finals at last week’s Midwest Regional race in Wisconsin, was 37th today and presumably plans to extend her season by one more week.
There were other high-school races today, too. But I have nothing to say about openly racist events.
It may not be obvious, but I enjoy writing about aerobic wars like these far more than I do reviewing and opining on cultural or literal ones. Not only is no one harmed in this style of combat the end, but—despite their often-slapstick appearances—these battles make a lot more inherent sense, and always result in human dreams being advanced or at worst reformulated rather than being “cancelled" or wiped out forever.