St. John’s swept the team and individual titles, with senior Chris Tetter making a big jump in the last few months and freshman Meredith Gotzman won her first 5k. See more photos here.
Woodrow Wilson’s boy edged the School Without Walls and the Tiger girls finished comfortably ahead of Bell. Roosevelt junior Fajr Kelly won the girls’ race by more than two minutes. See more photos here.
It wasn’t a race she ran that showed Walter Johnson coaches Tom Martin and Ashley St. Denis that Jenna Goldberg was serious about cross country.
It was a race she wasn’t going to be running. A JV runner her freshman year, Goldberg was not on the Walter Johnson roster for the state meet. But when the team made arrangements to go up to Hereford High School to practice on the course a week before the championships, Goldberg asked if she could come along.
“They went and did a hill workout at Hereford and hung with the varsity girls,” St. Denis said. “I remember taking a video and saying ‘we got ’em!’ They liked the team, they wanted to be a part of it.”
In the past few years, Loudoun Valley has built tremendous depth with a large team that typically wins most, if not all, team titles at different invitationals – varsity and junior varsity. Kevin Carlson has seen that from the Vikings’ varsity team since 2016.
But with that depth come some tough calls when the numbers crunch for championship races, and that’s where the Vikings found themselves last November. With another Nike Cross Southeast title in hand, the harder task was figuring out who would represent the team as it went to defend its 2017 title. Carlson finished 113th overall that year — 7th for Loudoun Valley, but in the scoring five for all but three other teams.
Carlson and Mateo Barreto finished in a dead heat for number seven on the team in 2018. Barreto, like Chase Dawson a year before, ran unattached. In essence, the free agent must just beat the last Viking to make the team. It’s cutthroat, but when a team trains for November but is limited to seven runners through the Virginia postseason, it’s the most effective way to field the strongest team, if only by fractions of a second. That 2018 team went on to be the first repeat NXN champion on the boys’ side.
“We had to ask to see the video replay, that’s how close it was,” Coach Marc Hunter said. “From where I was standing, I could see Kevin cross first. The video showed Mateo first.”
If you see Garrett Suhr running the 100 meters this spring, you’ll know things are going really well for him.
By Suhr’s retelling, Richard Montgomery Coach Davy Rogers promised him that if he got through three seasons — outdoor track in 2019, cross country in 2019 and the upcoming indoor track season, he would be allowed to compete in the marquee sprinting event.
“I don’t remember agreeing to that exactly, that might be one of those bets he made with himself,” Rogers said. “I can’t keep track of all these deals he makes. If he is healthy all three seasons, he’ll be running for a good college team and he can make a deal there.”
Bethany Graham wasn’t sure what to make of Taryn Parks. The senior from Greencastle-Atrim in Pennsylvania has been a mainstay at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships since her freshman year and had run 4:37 for 1600 meters over Memorial Day weekend. Graham ultimately chose not to change her plans for the Oatlands Invitational.
“I knew she raced pretty similar to me, that she liked to get out,” Graham said. “I decided to just run normally and see what happened. I didn’t want to change too much because she was in the race.”
Successful partnerships between coaches and runners all involve some give and take. Regardless of how established a coach is, two-way communication is crucial to keeping runners healthy and improving. For a new coach whose native sport is soccer, like Lauren Brewer at Broad Run, having a runner who knows the ropes helps a lot.
Senior Ellie Desmond has been doing her fair share of teaching.
“When last year started winding down, she saw how many seniors we were losing and knew she had to step up,” Brewer said. “As soon as the track season ended, she asked if she could take on more responsibility and help guide the team.”
Brewer had been an assistant cross country coach the previous two years, but was still new to the structure of distance running training programs. Fortunately Desmond was a voracious student and willing to offer her experience.
“We got the coaches and captains together and came up with a program together — the long runs, tempo runs, track work, why it’s important to schedule things a certain way,” Brewer said. “She’s absolutely put her footprint on the way we run the team. She’s setting the standard, and she knows how to communicate to the other runners how I want to run this team.”
Bryce Lentz was frustrated with his dead legs. After he dropped a place to finish third at last week’s Pole Green Invitational, he aired his bodily grievances to his coach Dave Davis.
“I really don’t care, it’s September,” Davis recalled saying to Lentz, who is starting his junior year at Colgan High School. “The leaves are still green and you’re running 65 miles a week. Nothing matters.”
Lentz is still a little green himself. Even though he has been running since seventh grade, the last year, since moving to Virginia and winning the JV race at Great Meadow in his 2018 debut, has been steadily finishing toward the front of races. He won the Cardinal District last year, plus the 1600 and 3200 meters during the track season.
After finishing fifth in Virginia’s 6A cross country state championship, and because he’s 6’3″, he is losing the element of surprise.
“He won’t be able to sneak up on people anymore,” Davis said. “It was nice to hide, but we can’t hide anymore.”
Bethany Graham has plenty of reasons to fuel her running with frustration.
Despite brilliant starts to the past two cross country seasons, she hasn’t made the state meet since her freshman year. Stress fractures in 2017 and a sprained ankle in 2018 have kept her out of postseason racing.
Yet, she falls back on positive thinking. Back to something she learned through Girls on the Run.
“You just take the negative plug out,” she said. “It sounds silly but it still works for me today. Mentality is a big part of racing. If you’re not mentally confident, you’re not going to do well. You won’t have the confidence to compete with the best.
“I had to work on that for a while, but now it’s one of my strongest points.”
Race car driver and raconteur Reece Bobby said it best, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
Sean Stuck knows that. At last spring’s Virginia 6A track championships, he brought up the rear in the 1600 meters, finishing just 16 seconds out of first place. Fortunately, he won the 3200 meters.
Sometimes races go well and sometimes they don’t, and for Stuck, it’s much more more of the former, lately. Since he hit is growth spurt after his freshman year and dropped baseball, he has found a home on West Springfield’s top seven, and he’s an integral part of the Spartans’ state title hopes this fall.
“Sean’s main strength is that he doesn’t fear anybody or anything,” said West Springfield coach Chris Pellegrini. “That governor in everyone’s brain that tells people they maybe shouldn’t do something, that gives them doubt? He just doesn’t have that; his confidence exists in that moment of truth during races.”
