Scholastic track championships on a goshdarned Sunday: NHIAA and GNAC (the other one)
Uncelebrated gamers will be on frenetic display in Boston
The 2023 New Hampshire High School Indoor Track and Tarmac Championships are today at Dartmouth College’s Leverone Field House. The Division I meet starts at 10:00 a.m. EST, while Division II competition commences at 4 p.m. Both meets will be livestreamed on New Hampshire Track and Field dot com’s YouTube channel, while its main site has a meet hub. The spokes of this hub are weblinks to related information; much of this concerns similar gatherings that have already taken place and where the losers always vastly outnumber the winners in a defiant stream of wheezing, beaten bodies.
From a hasty ganderglance at the seeding lists for D-I and D-II, it’s evident that some of the distance events feature remarkably heavy favorites, with the picture muddied in both directions by these lists being incomplete and thus directly antagonistic to their own purpose. For example, sophomore Matthew Giardina of Bishop Guertin is a nine-second favorite in the D-I boys’ 3,000 meters based on his seed time of 9:04.43, but Giardina ran 8:53.93 at the Boston University Terrier Classic on January 27. It appears that the NHIAA used only times, heights, and distances recorded in New Hampshire league meets this season for state-championship-seeding purposes, which probably confuses only followers living in other time zones, and in particular zones dedicated chiefly to the production and mass distribution of combustible cannabinoids.
In the D-I boys’ 1,500 meters, Bedford junior Jacob Redman—who has no known connections to the recently deracialized, and therefore less carcinogenic, product fondly known as “America’s Best Chew”—is an even safer-on-paper bet, with his 4:02.86 giving him a ten-second cushion on Londonderry’s Ryan Fortin (also the number-two seed in the 3,000 meters). But Redman is also running the 1,000 meters, in which he’s seeded second and which takes place shortly before the 1,500 meters.
It’s a grim double, one my teammate Chris Basha pulled off in 1988 (when there was one combined D-I and D-II meet) after setting a state record in the earlier event.
Also, while the 600 meters is not a distance event, Londonderry cross-country superstandout Sean Clegg’s seed time of 1:22.40 is a remarkable 3.67 seconds better than anyone he’ll be racing this afternoon.
In D-II, University of Virginia-bound Coe-Brown senior Aidan Cox tops the 3,000-meter performance list by about 36 seconds with an 8:39.91, which is slightly slower than the 8:16.65 he ran at the Terrier Classic. (Cox’s sister Addison, a freshm..a “FR” at Virginia, ran a personal-best 16:37.83 on Friday night at the B.U. Valentine Meet, making her the fastest female Cavalier on the 2022-2023 season.) Cox can obviously put himself in cruise-control in that race—9:00, or 3:00 per kilometer, is around his 10K pace right now— while his teammate Jamie Lano can presumably do the same in the 1,000 meters, where Lano’s very quick 2:31.86 makes him the only sub-2:40 kid in the field.
Lano, unfortunately, has no shot at the D-II and statewide record in that event. Zak Wright’s 2:27.38 from 1994 is of a piece with the once-in-a-generation Cox’s 8:16 3,000 meters despite being run—I think—at Leverone Field House, which in those days had a flat 220-yard track. That record isn’t unbreakable, but had Wright run the same race on today’s B.U. track, he’d have flirted with 2:25. It’s likely that someone reading this will recall how much Wright won that 29-year-old race by, but it had to have been at least ten seconds.
The boys’ D-II 1,500m is intriguing because it will bring together Cox, Lano, and a third Coe-Brown runner, Tyler Tkaczyk. These are the top three seeds in the race, with their times listed 4:06.76, 4:07.03, and 4:08.35, in that order. The D-II state record is 4:06.50, set in 2012 by Bow’s Jonathan Vinnenberg (who I believe is the only New Hampshire high-school runner other than Wright to break 2:30 for the 1,000 meters). And Lano’s 4:23.61 mile at the Terrier Classic converts to a 4:04.08.
Cox, as you may have heard, can jog the 3,000 meters and still win it. His teammates will have plenty of juice for the 1,500 meters no matter what happens in their other events. Cox is probably capable of 3:53-3:55 right now, but I’m not sure he’ll go for broke today given that he’s eyeing at least national-championship-level meet in March. No matter what, though, it seems likely that these three will make a concerted effort to drag the state 1,500-meter record into Coe-Brown’s possession, maybe even knocking Vinnenberg down to fourth place on the all-time D-II list in the process.
The statewide 1,500-meter record across all high-school classifications—natal boys, the various sexes that now include girls, and immigrants old enough to buy beer—is 3:57.60, set in 2019 by Exeter’s Jacob Winslow. In that perfectly paced solo effort, Winslow went over a second under the previous mark of 3:58.63, set by Nashua North’s John Schroeder at the 2006 D-I Championships in another classic nail-biter.
Also today are the GNAC Championships; these should not be confused with the GNAC Championships, which are slated to begin a week from tomorrow in Spokane, Washington. My nephew Hayden has a big day planned for the East Coast rendition, which is being livestreamed here from Boston University’s Track and Tennis Center starting at 11 a.m. EST.
The coaches in this conference’s five indoor member schools must get along famously, because they vote on things other coaches, to my knowledge, do not. One of these issues is, “Which of the teams we coach are favored to win the upcoming men’s and women’s conference championships?” Per this polling, the narrow 2023 favorite among men’s teams is Saint Joseph’s of Maine (no relation to Tom’s of Maine), with Hayden’s Colby-Sawyer Chargers predicted to be close behind (write-up).
Now, I’m no dumbass. But even I can detect that this was all a clever motivational ploy by the coaches, not a poll conducted for classic purposes such as consensus-gathering and weaponizing the around-the-clock propaganda flowing from a syphilitic morass of Langley-spawned stink-tanks, surly Substack agitators, and other high-energy, self-dealing transgressors operating in shadows of sleaze you’ve never imagined, let alone seen.
Believe none of it. Hayden and his teammates decided quite on their own to go big today.
Hayden is running the mile at 1:25 p.m., and he should win or place second to his teammate Dylan, who will first be running the 5,000 meters as a heavy favorite (see the TFRRS performance list for this conference). Then, at 2:50 p.m., Hayden will run the 800 meters, his most beloved event and one he expects to win. His seed time is 2:04.81, converted from an actual time of 2:06.59 on an unbanked track. (That probably makes my 2:03 in a 1990 practice session on the University of Vermont’s concrete-manure-alloy 160-meter “track” worth a 1:49-1:50 at B.U.; perhaps I will contact the proper authorities and seek an amendment.)
At 3:35 p.m., Hayden will run the first 3,000 meters of his life. He’s probably capable of a 9:20 fresh, but with Dylan the top seed with a 9:09 and only one other runner having broken 10:00 all season, he shouldn’t have to run close to that to score points. Then, at 4:55 p.m. and possibly depending on the score of the meet, Hayden will run the 1,200-meter leg of the distance medley relay.
It is worth interjecting that none of this was planned by the Colby-Sawyer coaches. These guys know what they are tackling and took it upon themselves to try to win this meet and take whatever coaching guidance that filtered its way through and across this collective effort. It’s also worth pointing out that none of these kids were superstars or even especially good in high school; I’ve already reviewed Hayden’s progress from a 5:37 miler as a high-school senior to where he is now.
These young men are not used to winning much of anything, individually or otherwise. Or weren’t, before they found an environment that supports and reinforces and, yes, elevates whatever talent and gifts and personalities they bring. Now that they have a chance to win something together, they’re seizing it. They don’t need to do this to impress their coaches, though—that judgment was irrevocably rendered in the affirmative already.
All of this on a Sunday, too. That used to be either officially or informally off-limits in high schools and in the NCAA except for emergencies, but luckily, nothing is sacred anymore and these upstarts based in New London, New Hampshire will be doing anything but resting on the seventh day.
(2/13/22 note: This post has been corrected. The original version identified John Schroeder as the current 1,500-meter record-holder among New Hampshire high school boys.)