The New Hampshire Meet of Champions is today (with livestream link)

Plus a review of last week's state meet highlights

As someone who has organized many of his thoughts and much of his life around competitive running, I would probably be keeping tabs on the New Hampshire high-school scene no matter the character of the place or the personalities driving scholastic running there. But being from a state with only 1.4 million people (almost as many as Philadelphia, despite not always being sunny) and knowing many of those personalities as former mentors, colleagues and teammates ensures that immersing myself in long-distance (and occasionally, in-person) spectatorship year after year is automatic.

In the spring, New Hampshire holds its three divisional state-championship meets on Memorial Day weekend, with the top performers at those meets advancing to the Meet of Champions the following weekend. Most states don’t bother with an all-state (i.e., combined-divisions, best-against-best, period) meet, even small ones like New Hampshire, where the MoC is obviously facilitated by lower athlete numbers. This is because the main purpose of the MoC—where no team titles are awarded and in fact no scoring is done—is to qualify six athletes in each event for the following week’s New England Championships. No other part of the country features this oddity—a conglomeration of states holding status as a semi-official region.

When I was in high school in the late 1980s, the New Englands were a really big deal because there were few opportunities to race people from other parts of the country or even other states unless you were exceptionally good. There were no official national track championship meets, and no one from New Hampshire bothered traveling to All-Easterns or whatever it was called in New York unless he or she was legitimately among the best in the country. Despite the greater availability today of out-of-state meets both during and after the regular season regardless of ability level, just getting to the New Englands remains a worthy goal for kids from all over the area, especially those traveling by rickshaw or donkey from Northern Maine. Spend one weekend camping up there and you’ll immediately understand why Pine Tree State native Stephen King has spent several hundred years writing mostly horror stories.

Another great thing about keeping tabs on a small state is that it’s easy to write about the major players and events in a way anyone interested in running can theoretically enjoy—there are only so many names every spring associated with times like 4:15 for the boys’ 1,600 meters or 11:00 for the girls’ 3,200 meters, so by this time, I’ve usually mentioned the same batch of names repeatedly. I haven’t been as focused on New Hampshire in 2022 as I was last year, with the graduation of one special kid and a burgeoning need to fume about the collapse of the world and my own mental stability taking precedence over the usual dutiful chronicling of standout times.

The 2022 New Hampshire Meet of Champions starts at 2:30 p.m., with the track action starting at 3:30 p.m. Since an entire site dedicated to New Hampshire high-school track and field exists, I’ll hand off the meet preview to Nate Leveille of NewHampshireTrackAndField.com (tiny state, balky URL; could be Freudian, probably not). You can find start lists and seed times there, and the YouTube livestream is below.

Because the state meets last week were all about team points, virtually every distance runner of serious consequence competed in at least two events, meaning that running for time was not at issue. This was perhaps most evident in the Division III 1,600-meter races. Look at the splits of the winners.

Seigne is fascinating because not only did he run a 2:01.99 800 meters to close a 4:15.58 1,600 meters last week, but he has never run cross-country (you can probably guess how he has spent his autumns as a high-schooler). He’s run 1:56.27 for the 800 meters despite a listed 400m best of only 53.62. As Leveille writes, if Torin Kindopp of Division 1 Keene offers an honest race, someone might break 4:10. (The state record is 4:07.76, run by Francis Hernandez in 2010.)

If you’re needing to catch a buzz before today’s meet is served, check out the finish of last week’s D-1 girls’ 4 × 800m (the video should start at the right spot, but if not, go to the 20:00 mark). I want to feel bad for the Bishop Guertin girl who elected to start the party before looking closely at the guest list, but she will never make the same mistake again. Also, it’s just a track meet, and there are so many girls named Fiona and Mary Kate and Liam at these Catholic schools that within three years, no one will remember who committed this particular sin.