Who will be the SURPRISE BREAKOUTS of the N.H. XC season? NOBODY!
That's because we're here SPOIL THE SUSPENSE by BREAKING DOWN the kids who are unexpectedly TEARING UP THE TURF this fall
When I was running for Concord High School in the late (nineteen) eighties, it was possible for kids at Division I (then called “Class L”) schools to not even know of the existence of emerging and in some cases already very goshdarned good kids from tiny-ass schools, usually far to the north in the White Mountains, until encountering them at the Meet of Champions (MoC). That’s the event on the first weekend in November that started in the mid-1970s and brings together the top individuals and runners from the previous weekend’s D1, D-II and D-II state meets for a combination of statewide bragging rights and New England Championship berths.
We Concord and other large-school kids would see all the other D-I and most of the D-II runners at least once at invitationals and dual meets during the season, and the southern New Hampshire newspapers covered any meaningful meets between sizable schools that we didn’t attend. But D-III runners who hadn’t established their credentials in previous seasons were often a total mystery to populated portions of the state until after Hallowe’en and the MoC, because most of those tiny teams skipped the Manchester Invitational at the end of September and just raced each other on “5K” courses measured with fire trucks, mules, or snowmobiles. And while solid individuals often emerged from the incestuous thickets of Granite State High Country, no exceptionally good teams ever did. As a result, every school north of, say, Laconia may as well have been in a different state altogether.
Occasionally, some kid from a tiny school would have a breakout race in context at the D-III State Championships, maybe a top-three finish he wasn’t expecting, only to make a similar jump at the Meet of Champions and pop a 16:40, in those days good for a top-ten finish at the MoC at Derryfield Park. This de facto cloaking of nascent top talent doesn’t happen as often anymore owing to the increased mingling of small and large schools throughout the season, and thanks to the Internet and the standardization of 5K courses, if a kid from the Public Schoolhouse of Dead Pecker Ridge (est. 1654; enrollment 37) runs fast in early September, it’s news before midnight to the rest of the state.
My junior year, Concord was coming off a disappointing second-place finish to Pinkerton Academy at the D-I State Championships, and our seniors-heavy team carried an abysmal attitude into the Meet of Champions. A number of those seniors basically jogged it, hoping to not be forced to run in the New Englands, but we somehow got the sixth and final qualifying spot. The coach was incensed and ready to quit on the spot (he waited until the off-season).
About four minutes into this race, I was bouncing along somewhere in the top twenty, and a Pinkerton kid running alongside me turned and said, “Who the fuck is that?” in an almost hysterical falsetto, like we were running from alien invaders instead of for the pure joy of choking at the perfect time. This knight in shining acne was referring to a kid about five seconds ahead, probably in the top ten, from what turned out to be Littleton High. The implication was the kid was a gomer and would be gassed before he was halfway up the first serious hill on the course. As the years have passed, the trainers he was wearing have slowly been transformed into shitkicker boots over argyle stockings in some recountings of this story.
Instead, he never came back to his indulgent detractors at all, instead pulling far ahead to finish seventh or eighth. He beat everyone on our team, and I don’t think his team stayed for the awards because their rickshaw had to start the return trip to Quebec before the shadows grew too long. What the fuck was that? I love it when this kind of surprise happens, though it’s far better to be on the giving end—for example, to be the coach of a team from a tiny school that has one or two athletes who unexpectedly change the complexion of the entire statewide race up front.
I was reminded of this phenomenon thanks to how easy it is today to accomplish the main goal of this post, which is to scout for kids who are both fast and still rapidly ascendant, either because they’re juniors or seniors who had inauspicious starts to their high-school careers or because they’re still close to the beginnings of those careers and have yet to line up for a high-school championship race.
I focus primarily on high-schoolers in Colorado and New Hampshire, mostly the latter because I can still count all the people there by hand. Today marks the beginning of championship-level racing in both states, with Colorado staging most of its nineteen regional meets on the day and the Capital Area Championships taking place two thousand miles away in Concord.
The Capital Area Championships is not a real championship race; it’s loosely equivalent to a Merrimack County Championships organized by people with a rough idea of what a globe is for, though originally it was meant to capture people likely to read, or be aware of, the Concord Monitor. But it may be the only race I ever won with “championship” in the title, so I rarely let mid-October pass without mentioning it and reposting the same grainy images from the Sunday, October 25, 1987 edition of the Monitor and the 1988 Concord High School yearbook. It’s amazing how thorough this article was, even for the era.
That this meet (agate history) is now on a Thursday instead of a Saturday, giving nine days instead of seven to recover for the Division I State Championships, reflects a grudging infusion of common sense into the sport. In the eighties, at least where I was, it would have been unthinkable to hold top runners out of dual meets to rest them for the big ones. Then again, we didn’t have invitationals every weekend then, either. And while some teams had success getting their top runners to cooperate and hold back in midseason dingbat meets against teams whose runners all wore Keds and Chuck Taylor high-tops, as the article indicates, ours did not. (I tried.)
Concerning how the New Hampshire season is looking, Division I is as wide open as it could possibly be on the boys’ side. Had Concord gone to the Battle of the Border on October 8, it would have offered a near-complete preview of the Division I championship race, as well as a run on the course that will be used for this year only for the Meet of Champions on November 5 as Mine Falls Park in Nashua undergoes construction. But the Tide instead went to Rhode Island to preview the course for the New Englands on November 12.
Concord, Nashua South, Londonderry, or Bishop Guertin could all win the title on the 19th in Manchester. So could some other team. At the Manchester Invitational on September 24, the top Division I school placed tenth with 379 points, behind eight out-of-state teams and Division II Coe-Brown Academy. The next two Division I teams had 380 and 382 points, so at least it’s not lonely at what passes for the top this year.
Coe-Brown raced last Saturday at the MSTCA Bob Glennon Twilight Meet in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and despite holding out Aidan Cox, the Bears finished second among twenty-three teams with a top-five average of 16:22. The course was suspiciously fast, but had Cox run and turned in a 14:50, that average would have been 15:59. And word has it they were still without one of their top runners at full strength. They will destroy the competition at the Division II Championships and again at the MoC.
It’s likely that the top three boys in the state this year will come from D-II or D-III schools. Cox could be challenged in the upcoming meets by Lebanon’s Birhanu Harriman, while Patrick Gandini of Division III Gilford has the potential to run under 15:40 at Derryfield Park and close to 15:00 on the course where the MoC will unfold.
One New Hampshire girl who has made astonishing progress is senior Susannah Zahn of D-II Bow, which is to Concord what Gunbarrel is the Boulder. As a freshman in 2019, Zahn was 85th at the state meet in 23:15. The 2020 spring season was wiped out by covid, and perhaps so too was Zahn’s motivation, as she wound up 98th at the state meet as a sophomore in 26:16. Yes, 26:16. The next spring, she ran 5:59 and 12:52 for 1,600m and 3,200m, and last fall improved to 24th at the state meet with a 21:28.
Last spring, Zahn TOTALLY broke out, and we’re not talking about HIVES! She…well, here’s what her 3,200-meter performances looked like last spring (read from bottom to top, like Hebrew or Arabic):
Zahn has continued that roll for the most part into the 2022 cross-country season, running a sublime 18:16 at the Manchester Invitational to defeat Briana Malone of Portsmouth Christian by 29 seconds. At the Black Bear Invitational the next weekend on a somewhat slower course, Malone turned the tables, and again it wasn’t close—18:43 to 19:17. But regardless of how the rest of Zahn’s season and year goes, she’ll wind up having enjoyed a stupefying improvement over the last one-third or so of her high-school career.
I can’t say that any upperclassman New Hampshire boy has made a similar impact, but Division I Keene—which skipped the Manchester Invitational and tends to hide from in-state competition until the championship meets arrive, has a freshman named Sullivan Sturtz as its top runner. Despite having a name out of a bad Janet Evanovich novel (they’re all bad), Sturtz ran 16:14 at the Connecticut Valley Conference Championships on Saturday to place second, 22 seconds behind Harriman. He could very well win the Division I individual title, although that might require off-days by sophomore Matthew Giardina of Bishop Guertin and the Londonderry Duo of Sean Clegg and Ryan Fortin.
Here in Colorado, and close by, the 4A Region 3 meet will be held this morning in Golden, and the 5A Region 3 meet will be this afternoon in Northglenn. The 4A meet features the #2 girls’ team in the nation per Milesplit, Niwot High School, while the 5A meet includes Boulder High School, Fairview of Boulder, and Monarch High of Louisville, recently voted the most Karen-dense small city (<50,000 population) in the Western world by everyone who’s been there. I was going to attend the 4A meet, but the facility doesn’t allow dogs. I may venture over to Northglenn (“the Bronx of Colorado”) for the 5A races.
The Colorado State Championships are on the 29th in Colorado Springs, and if I can get a date, I may go to those. No one ever leaves a high-school state championship meet feeling enfeebled or de-energized, and this state has some fantastic talent, especially its current girls’ crop.
There’s more local off-road on Saturday, when the USATF National Masters Cross-Country 5K Championships get going in South Boulder. I’ll be there to watch, as I have a morbid fascination with large groups of people my age running as hard as they can. That so many people can attempt this, over and over, despite knowing better at some level continues to inspire me to plan for races of my own, efforts perpetually a few months away as I put in my desultory sixty or so minutes a day. Better to procrastinate at attempting a good habit than at quitting a bad one, some rationalizer once said as he quit another workout during the third rep. I’m also having difficulty attaching any spiritual significance to optional goals these days, though I inexplicably continue to attend to duties and responsibilities that are supposedly important but can’t possibly mean a damn thing. But the weather should be favorable, if maybe a little warm for a course with no shade, the races should be fun to report on, and I’ll wind up seeing more than a few familiar faces.
In the coming days, I’ll be lapsing back into curmudgeonly drudgery by reviewing the media’s coverage of the latest Kenyan doping scandal and complaining about the sport’s most adored self-aggrandizing grifter-jogger and her newly released manifesto on how to stay racist forever. Then I’ll return to ranting about the depressing stuff while any of us* still have time to exchange unpleasantries.