Before this season, Northampton’s Riley Cole had never actually had a full high school cross-country season.
His freshman year, he was still uncovering his running talent and didn’t join the team. As a sophomore, a severe stress fracture put him on the sidelines for nine months, and his junior year was an unusual one because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, as a senior, he was given the chance to compete in a full cross-country season.
He took that opportunity and ran with it – quite literally.
When you only have one shot to make an impression, you need a special kind of focus to make it count. Luckily for Cole, the 2021 Gazette Boys Cross Country Runner of the Year, he’s got that in spades.
“He’s very, very focused, and that’s something that as a high school kid, that’s not always a given. There’s a lot of stuff going on, especially him as a senior with college things, having school through pandemic is really tough,” Northampton head coach Eric Pfalzgraf said. “But I think the mental game for him is super, super strong. I think having that be as good as it is for him, I think that’s what makes him kind of as special as he is compared to other other good runners that I’ve seen.”
Cole came late to the running game. He didn’t start running competitively until his freshman year in high school, when he joined the outdoor track team. But his pathway to racing started a little earlier than that. It all began with two of the most dreaded fitness tests of them all: the PACER Test and the mile time trial.
Those words spark fear in the hearts of many. For Cole, it sparked a flame. He’d grown up playing a variety of different sports – basketball, baseball and soccer, to name a few – and had started to have an inkling that he was one of the speedier kids on those teams. But those tests gave him a chance to see exactly how fast he could go.
“In middle school, there was always the PACER Test and the mile, and I was always shooting for those presidential ratings in each event that they had for The FitnessGram test, and the PACER Test,” he explained. “And the mile was always the one I was best at. That’s (how I knew) that I was pretty good at running.”
As a sixth grader, he ran a respectable 6 minutes, 42 seconds during the mile time trial, but lost the actual race to a classmate, who finished a second ahead of him. That stuck with him until he got a chance to run again in eighth grade (they didn’t run it in seventh), where he promptly dropped a minute and a half off his time, finishing in 5:10. By the time he was a freshman, that dropped to 4:27, and the rest was history.
Even though he was relatively new to the cross country scene, Cole won just about everything this year. He crossed the finish line first in every race he ran except one – the state meet (where he finished second). He won the PVIAC Championships, defending the title that his former teammate and mentor, Tobias L’Esperance, won the last time the race was held in 2019. He shattered the 16 minute mark, running a season’s best 5K time of 15:37.08. But while the hardware and accolades are nice, what keeps him running are the friends he’s made along the way.
“Racing and running is a lot of fun, a great stress-reliever for me,” Cole said. “But I would just say the community really pulled me into it. Toby and many other alums now, they were great. Teammates and leaders cared about everyone, and it was nice to know that because with some other sports, I didn’t really feel that way. That kind of spirit, really, is what I enjoy about it more than just the running.”
That spirit that drew Cole to the sport is something that he will pass on to the next group of talented runners rising through Northampton’s rank. Though certainly not the loudest voice on the Blue Devils team, Cole’s leadership is just as impactful. His leadership will leave an impact that his coach dubbed “the Riley Effect,” even after he graduates.
“(He) leads by example… he obviously has his personal goals, but he super cared about the team making it through the postseason. (He was) making sure that everyone was doing as much as they could,” Pfalzgraf said. “He made sure that everyone was up to his level of focus, too. I think that bodes well for the future, too, now that’s instilled in some of these young guys.”
Cole plans to run in college, though he’s still waiting to hear back from all the schools he applied to before he decides where that will be. Safe to say, his distance running career is just getting started.
Ben Buffone, senior, Amherst
Evan Harrington, senior, Belchertown
Theodore King-Pollet, sophomore, Northampton
Diego Lopez, junior, Amherst
Gulian Marconi, senior, Hampshire
Odin Moore, senior, PVCICS
Jude Mourad, junior, Northampton
Dillon Neveu, junior, Hampshire
David Pinero-Jacome, senior, Amherst
Jackson Seney, junior, Hampshire
Davis Wheat, sophomore, Northampton
Kyle Yanko, sophomore, Amherst
Brandon Adamson, sophomore, Belchertown
Trevor Adamson, sophomore, Belchertown
Nick Brisson, sophomore, Hampshire
Evan Coltman, senior, Hampshire
Jeffrey Fish, senior, Hampshire
Kyan Frantz, junior, PVCICS
Luke Howard, eighth grade, Frontier
Elijah Quinn, sophomore, Holyoke
Spencer Waite, sophomore, Amherst
Ryan Yanko, senior, Amherst
Dominic Zajko, senior, Gateway
Erich Brown, junior, Frontier
Patrick Boyden, senior, Frontier
Gavin Dafonte, sophomore, Hampshire
Derek Gould, sophomore, Belchertown
Nolan Hall, junior, Granby
Samuel Hunt, senior, Belchertown
Kai Paik, senior, Northampton
Isaac Roth, junior, Northampton
Gavin Sullivan, junior, Holyoke