The New England Championships, and a partial NCAA Regionals recap
As the 2022 season reaches its denouement, a glimpse into a great high-school program and why these are so valuable
The New England High-School Cross-Country Championships, sans Massachusetts, were held yesterday in Ponaganset, Rhode Island. NewHampshireCrossCountry.com, a great site that needs a great, compact URL, was quick to upload the race videos.
I recommend watching these even if you dislike the sight of people exercising, because this is one beautiful layout. And if you prefer spoilers to drama, the results are here.
Thanks to an aforementioned (and somewhat resolved) series of technical errors compounded by personal truculence, I was unable to supply a promised or at least powerfully foreshadowed preview of the event. This may have ultimately worked in my favor, because Amby Burfoot, whose role in the sport as a journalist has been great enough to practically negate his winning the 1968 Boston Marathon, has been following my intermittent summaries of New England turf action and shared some insights with me about the winning boys’ team.
That team was William H. Hall High School of West Hartford, Connecticut. Although Bishop Hendricken (Warwick, R.I.) may have been favored coming in based on its win at the Manchester Invitational in September, where Hendricken’s 87 points were 15 better than runner-up Hall’s total, Hall was bringing what sounds like a gleeful army to the covered-bridge-enhanced layout revealed in the above videos. The 2022 boys’ cross-country team at Hall High School has 146 (1-4-6) names on its roster.
In 2017, Burfoot wrote a piece on his blog about the Hall cross-country program and specifically the approach of its coach, Jeff Billing, to a pre-season time-trial including eleven 3,200-meter heats (at the time, Hall could only field 120 boys). Billing’s method of eyeballing the fitness levels of his charges and sticking them in a race-not-race situation is familiar to me, as in my seasons at Bishop Brady I held separate 3,200-meter time trials for the boys and girls that weren’t really time trials for the top runners because no one was allowed to run faster than 80 seconds a lap (boys) or 96 (girls) until the final lap.
With a total of 15 to 30 mostly inexperienced runners, the logistics of my version were simpler and the results less dramatic than what Billing sees every August. But I agree that giving kids an honest test without necessarily adding seasonal race context (few kids understand what a 3,200-meter time even translates to for a 5K) is a good way for a coach to get a read on his own read of his team as well as let kids blow off some competitive steam before the first race of the season arrives.
As Burfoot describes, Billing has the brains of a standard Silicon Valley tech geek with none of the accompanying human-soul-crushing spirit. After graduating from MIT and being lured to Oracle in Palo Alto, Billing learned that he despised the work more than he liked the money and took a significant pay cut to do what he does now: Coach cross-country and baseball [edit: and teach math] on the East Coast.
Burfoot was at the meet yesterday. He wrote to me: “Hall won because a soph runner [Ben Lewis] moved from 121 at the mile to 41 at the finish. In part due to good coaching. Jeff said: ‘We were probably in 2nd place at 4900 meters.’” And that’s probably true, as Hall won by only nine eight points.
That Billing is Burfoot’s nephew does nothing to cheapen the obviously deserved praise of a rare coach who trusts his accumulated wisdom while believing he invented none of it. It’s easy to see how Billing’s intuitive facility with numbers plays a secondary role to his ability to enliven kids. It’s a very simple but unfortunately rare combination.
The boys’ winner, Devan Kipyego of St. Raphael’s (R.I.), ran 4:00.64 for the mile last spring as a junior and has committed to Iowa State. It’s reasonable to expect a 3:57-3:58 out of him this spring and perhaps a sub-four indoors over the winter to prime the chase for a top-five all-time high-school mark over 1,760 yards. Behind Kipyego, New Hampshire boys claimed four of the top ten individual spots, twice as many as chance alone would allow. Coe-Brown superstar and rapidly extending reed Aidan Cox fell from second to fifth in the last kilometer and his health remains uncertain. I don’t yet have a sense of who from the Granite State is headed to which upcoming meets—Champs Sports (the latest temporary name for the former Kinney/Foot Locker/Eastbay series), Nike Cross Nationals (NXN), Garmin RunningLane, or some combination. (For reference, “I don’t have a sense of” in Substackese means “I have no idea and haven’t looked into it.”)
Meanwhile, the Glastonbury girls, whose win at the Connecticut State Open race last weekend got mention on Beck of the Pack, won the 87th New England Cross-Country Championships (which was not nearly the 87th of these for girls) with 116 points. It was easy to see all season long that Connecticut teams would dominate both team races yesterday, and they did so emphatically: Connecticut took five of the top six spots in the boys’ race and four of the top six in the girls’ race.
Three of the eight regional NXN meets were held this weekend, two will be held next weekend, and three will be held the weekend of November 26. It’s not possible to run both the Champs Sports and NXN series as a New Englander, because the Champs Sports Northeast Regionals and the NXN Northeast Regionals are on the same day in different parts of New York State.
I have said little to nothing about college cross-country this fall. This weekend saw a barrage of regional championships in D-I and D-III. In 2014, after the University of Colorado men won their second straight national title, I interviewed four of the members of the team for Running Times. This was a lot of fun, although in the seven seasons since then, the Colorado men have won no national titles while the Lumberjacks of Northern Arizona have won five.
The Colorado cross-country teams form one facet of the area’s running mystique, mainly because the longtime program director, Mark Wetmore, maintains the inscrutable aura and appearance of a pawn-shop owner, although lately he looks almost indistinguishable from the lead singer of Men Without Hats, which produced a tune in 1982 advising people to dance exactly as they chose to. Wetmore’s song and dance at C.U. is probably coming to a close soon, and it’s doubtful that his wife, Heather Burroughs, will linger after Wetmore’s departure.
This fall, then men have been ranked behind Air Force all season, an ignominious occurrence given the implication that the Buffs are beatable not only by teams from afar but by teams from within the state of Colorado. At the Mountain Regional in Albuquerque on Friday, Colorado suffered for lack of a sterling fifth runner but still landed third behind Northern Arizona and Brigham Young University (results). (By the way, there’s no chance in hell that course is 10,000 meters, not with those times at 5,000 feet above sea level.) The men will get an at-large bid to the D-I National Championships in Stillwater, Oklahoma next Saturday. The Colorado women will, too, despite finishing only fifth on Friday, with—ignominy again!—Colorado State University (also in Colorado) taking fourth and also assuring themselves a trip to Nationals.
Best of all, in one of the D-III meets, a runner I have known since she was in eighth grade—which was either last week or the one before that—qualified individually for the D-III Nationals in Lansing, Michigan next Saturday. Considering where her confidence often was in high school thanks to about 146 anti-Jeff Billings in her midst as horndog coaches, cowardly administrators, and the Karenified parents of imperious teammates, it’s a marvel she made it into a college uniform at all. But not really, if you knew her parents. I will be making the trip to see her and her family next Saturday, thereby already shattering the no-fly item on my recently posted inverse bucket-list.
Some lonely people without pets of their own are inclined to hang out at dog parks for a free and easy pick-me-up at any time. I would advise attending a significant cross-country meet to achieve the same effect, provided the weather remains more autumnal than wintry where you are next week and you can find a race within a few hours’ drive. If you have any runnerness within you, it is almost impossible to leave these things without feeling like hitting some hills even if you’re on crutches.
Finally, Massachusetts is holding its divisional state meets throughout this weekend in preparation for its ridiculously late All-States next Saturday. BayStateRunning.com has superior coverage of all of it, and the results of the six D-1 races (Massachusetts uses 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C, 3A, 3B, and 3C class designations) are here.
