The 2023 Manchester Invitational: Byron Grevious snags Derryfield Park record as Vermonters and prep-schoolers beat up on New Hampshire kids

How many precocious male talents in the town of Gilford is too many? And how should we handle Concord's dismaying slide into a post-mediocrity free-for-all?

The Manchester Invitational is arguably the major annual attraction of the New Hampshire high-school cross-country season, excluding years when the New England Interscholastic Championships are held in the Granite State. Despite being in late September, the meet has grown so much in prestige that its fields are deeper than those at the New Hampshire Meet of Champions, and every fall provides a de facto New England Championships preview (the Thetford Woods Trail Run two weekends hence serves the same basic function). This year’s New England Championships will be held in Belfast, a town where people have odd accents and a very long trip for most of the qualifiers.

When I last competed in the Manchester Invitational, the meet was about fifteen years old and sponsored in part by a local eatery called Pappy’s Pizza. I only know this because it was on the meet T-shirt, meaning that advertising works; I never ate at Pappy’s (my hometown of Concord is almost 20 miles north of Manchester) but among the first things I think of when considering my participation in this meet is the red long-sleeved shirt and what some of the white letters on it spelled. It’s heartening to see that the place is still in operation.

The meet in those days, though considered “big” because it drew teams from outside New Hampshire, also boasted only four races at the end of the 1980s—boys’ and girls’ junior-varsity and varsity 5K races. The 1987 featured a solid team from Brockton, Massachusetts—never the most genteel of towns—that looked like legitimate juvenile delinquents, and their heavily tattooed bus driver looked like a psychotic prison guard. A highly regarded team from Brookfield, Connecticut, also participated, but as I recall those boys looked like a bunch of pretty-boys. So we hurt them, and as badly as we could.

The event now excludes white thugs, but does include lots more mathletes and pretty-boys. As a result, the meet features boys’ and girls’ 2.1-mile 9th-grade races, sub-junior-varsity 2.1-mile races, junior-varsity 5K races, and large-school and small-school varsity races for a total of ten competitions (2023 results index). There is something encouraging in all of this, but it’s unclear precisely what that is.

My best finish at the Manchester Invitational was 10th, which was in my junior year. I ran ten seconds faster as a senior and wound up 14th. Had I run the time I ran in 1987 in yesterday’s large-school race, my effort would have gone literally unnoticed by everyone present as well as those later viewing the video, other than my probably looking too old to be out there flapping and flopping along among equally misguided teenage nerdboys. Had I instead come along 36 years later and failed to break seventeen minutes at age 17 on the 5K course around Derryfield Park—which is what you thought I meant before I lobbed a facile, needless joke into the mix in the previous sentence—I would have quit cross-country for lack of justification for even being out there and turned all of my attention to nurturing my burgeoning mathleticism. As I often assert and prove simultaneously, I never should have been allowed to join any team, organization, club, labor force, or polite hecklers’ society.

But because I did, I believe that Concord placed third at this meet my senior year, trailing two New Hampshire D-II schools (Stevens and Oyster River). We finished one place ahead of Essex, Vermont, the team that would win the New Englands later that fall in Connecticut’s Wickham Park. The individual winner, Dammon Spencer of Essex, ran 16:03, twenty-three seconds ahead of second-place Chris Basha of Concord. He looked not unlike the winner of yesterday’s large-school boys’ race, Byron Grevious of Phillips Exeter Academy.

But although any time close to sixteen minutes at Derryfield raised eyebrows into at least the mid-1990s and the Matt Downin-John Mortimer era, Spencer would have looked like a slug in the same race as Grevious, considered among the very best runners in the nation. (Prep schools—and New England is filthy with these, especially the “elite” kind that have long been grooming the future bandits of civilization for vitally disruptive and unwelcome roles in government and think-tanks—weren’t allowed in those days to mingle competitively with us daft and scraggly public-school kids.)

Grievous, a native of Connecticut, might not qualify as a New Hampshire kid, even though he goes to school in Exeter. Either way, he’s easily the most talented boy ever to compete at Derryfield Park. In June, at the end of his junior year, Grievous ran 14:04.44 in a meet at Bentley University, the Rolls-Royce of D-II Boston-area colleges. Derryfield Park has well-earned reputation as a frisky little bitch, but that kind of performance sets a kid up to do the once-unthinkable and dip under fifteen minutes at Derryfield.

Grievous could have broken that barrier had he needed to yesterday. En route to breaking the overall course record of 15:08 from 2013 by five seconds (results) and noted Greely, Maine alum Ben True’s meet record of 15:17 from 2003 by fourteen seconds, Grievous split 4:59 for the slightly uphill first mile, 5:04 for the strongly uphill second mile, and five minutes flat for the last 1.107 miles (4:31 pace). He was challenged for the first 2K by junior Tam Gavenas of Phillips Academy, another prep school.

Gavenas gave up virtually no ground to Grievous after the two-mile mark, but ran the most forgettable 15:12 in state history. Take note: Gavenas will presumably return to this meet next year.

Grev-stricken after a 15:03 CR and a nine-second win/ (Photo copyright RaceRunWell)

Significant portions of this race are shown in the video below. The New Hampshire Cross-Country YouTube channel has also provided videos of the girls’ large-school race and the boys’ and girls’ small-school races.

I could hear various people, including both the video commentators and the meet announcer in the background, misidentifying the overall Derryfield course records. Going into yesterday, both the boys’ and girls’ records had stood since the 2013 New England Championships, held at Derryfield on November 9, 2013. On that day, Trevor Hopper of Ridgefield, Connecticut ran 15:08, while fellow Nutmeg Stater Hannah DeBalsi (Staples) ripped a 17:15.

Discounting tenths of seconds, both this set of times and the fastest boys’ and girls’ times from yesterday sum to 32:23. This necessarily means that some girl missed the course mark by only five seconds yesterday—a storyline that will be resolved after several more paragraphs of annoying filler, much of it overtly parenthetical.

(On the topic of New England-based multimedia devoted to young runners and track athletes, I am pleased to report that the erstwhile partner sites NewHampshireCrossCountry.com and NewHampshireTrackandField.com have merged into one site. It appears that the higher-level domain staterunning.net is intended as a New England-centered competitor to Milesplit, as it now includes Connecticut, Maine. Massachusetts, and New Hampshire affiliates.)

Overall, New Hampshire public-school boys got well shithoused by the competition yesterday (large-school team results). This is not surprising. Vermont brought its three top boys’ teams, while Rhode Island sent its two best. And Phillips Exeter and Andover Phillips Academy, while great and reliably powerful additions to this meet, don’t really count. It’s also tempting to not count Bishop Guertin of Nashua as a New Hampshire team, either, since as a parochial “public-private” school it can basically recruit, and in most seasons around half of that school’s better runners live over the border in Taxachusetts.

But if we’re going there, well, perennial power teams and poped-up Catholic schools Bishop Hendricken and La Salle Academy of Rhode Island and Xavier of Connecticut should also be discarded. Anyone with any economic or geographical advantage at all, in fact, should no longer be allowed into any sanctioned or even unregulated meets, and we should erase their historical results as well. Some of these “kids” are reportedly as old as 27, as is the starting basketball center at one of these august institutions. No one bothers to check any claims anymore, no matter how brazen. And enough of this terrorism may well prove to be enough for us—not now, but certainly soon.

Since the new, combined New Hampshire-focused website already has a comprehensive write-up of the 2023 Manchester Invitational, and because I am both elitist and sexist to my chest-thumping core, I will only mention scattered details about the other races of the day.

• Ruth White, the two-time defending New Englands champion from Orono, Maine—a town far more remote from anywhere than even East Bumfuck by the standards of any rational arbitrator of snide ad hoc cartography—is the kind of kid who gets people interested in watching running. She is absolutely tiny, and contra making her wins look “effortless,” White looks like she’s putting as much effort as her diminutive body can into every step—arms churning, knees coming up. The wrinkle is that she seems to have a limitless reservoir of energy to pour into this roving ballet.

  

  Ruth White (L) and Lea Perreard near 1K yesterday (from NH.staterunning.net)

  White is the gal who ran 17:20 yesterday, missing DeBalsi’s record by five seconds and winning the girls’ small-school race by fifty seconds over sophomore Lea Perreard of Hanover, a determined girl who was clearly born with sunglasses fused to her head.

• Oyster River, though a D-II school, boasted the best girls’ team in New Hampshire yesterday by a narrow margin over Hanover. The first names of its top five runners yesterday: Mackenzie, Madelyn. Haley, Neely, Haley. This appears to have involved stark collusion; ORHS is plainly in a struggling mill town upstate, not a university town. Same with Hanover, actually.

• In the boys’ small-school race, a Gilford freshman named Bocelli Howland-Vlahakis—who needs, and probably owns, a nickname—ran 16:16 for third place overall. Gilford just graduated a kid named Patrick Gandini who was excellent starting in ninth grade and won a vast array of titles, and this boy is already as good as Gandini was in ninth grade.

• I recently wrote about some of the top girls’ teams in Colorado, also among the top teams in the nation. One of these teams is Air Academy of Colorado Springs, which traveled to Irvine, California last weekend to the Woodbridge Classic, held on a three-mile course.

  

  

  Based on this result, Air Academy has five girls capable of averaging about 17:10 for a fast 5K cross-country course. This roving pentad could therefore average around 17:45-17:50 at Derryfield Park.
  
  Concord’s top five boys averaged 18:17 yesterday, as the Tide placed 26th of 33 teams. To my thinking, no public school with an enrollment of over 1,500—and with access to around 750 fully male students—should have a boys’ cross-country team incapable of beating the best girls’ team in the country. And Air Academy isn’t even the top girls’ team in Colorado, let alone in the United States.
  
  But the antics of the current Concord team make it easy to see why they suck. Their top runner is a very determined and obviously OCD-riddled kid who has become adroit at dismissing input from his elders as misinformed bitterness, and also at confusing the relentless expenditure of aerobic energy with useful work. He does whatever he wants, whenever he feels like it, and the guy being paid to be the coach of the Concord boys’ team green-lights this kid’s foolishness on the foolishness-encouraging, one-hundred-percent douchebag-operated platform Strava.
  
  This “coach” should be embarrassed at how much he’s managed to actively wreck the Concord team in just a few years of jerking off at the helm. At least the OCD kid paced himself well and raced well yesterday, but unless he decides the sport deserves as much of his attention as his image and prematurely blowhardian blather does, he’ll be inconsistent at meets and squander most of his talent.

• And the Concord girls, who have a different coach, are going backward too. A few years ago, they had a young team that should have been great by 2023. They are mediocre, with their better girls treading water and looking lax in the process. And it’s not hard to see why. Someone supplied me with a typical week of training for these kids, and practically all they do is twiddle their legs. Sundays — rest. Wednesdays — yoga. Meet days — remember warm clothes and plenty of food. Easy days 3 or 4 miles.
  
  Twenty years ago, the Concord girls were coached by Barbara Higgins. Barb is a genuinely heroic-tragic figure whose biography rudely and persistently defies conventional description (maybe the least odd of these her giving birth at age 57). She might now be everyone’s first choice in every mentorship situation, and her history around Concord is colorful indeed. But she had a girls’ team in the fall of 2000, in the “Emberger” days, that had several runners capable of beating most of the current boys’ varsity. (Rachel Umberger was a national outdoor 800-meter champion in the fledgling days of official national track-and-field championships. Ember Smith was a multi-time state champion and one of about fourteen Mormon siblings whose parents tried to compensate for flooding the world with yet more Smiths by giving their kids unusual dog-like first names such as Pepper and Roscoe.)
  
  I get that high school isn’t a time for everyone on every team to give it 100 percent even 10 percent of the time, but high-school sports will not survive global war, even if most people unfortunately for themselves—will, at least for a while. I would advise that lazy coaches not waste good time, to paraphrase advice John Ngugi is wrongly credited with originally offering, and at least treating their jobs as real mentorship opportunities instead of frictionless bearings accompanied by job titles and paychecks.