NORTHAMPTON – With the postseason looming and bragging rights at stake, the Northampton and Amherst cross-country teams pushed themselves to the limit at a tough Northampton course on Tuesday afternoon.
The two teams split the dual meet, with the Northampton boys earning redemption from last year with a 24-31 win, and the Amherst girls squeaking away with a 26-29 victory in a “wicked close” finish
Amherst did walk away with both individual winners; David Pinero-Jacome broke away from Northampton’s Theodore King-Pollet late in the race and crossed the line in 17 minutes, 21 seconds for first, and Tamar Byl-Brann won the girls race handily with a time of 19:57.
You couldn’t have asked for a much closer team result in the girls race. Byl-Brann won with relative ease, and Northampton’s Norah Reade (20:20) and Amherst’s April Schilling (20:51) finished second and third, respectively. The difference-makers came with the team’s third, fourth and fifth runners. Amherst’s Elizabeth Sawicki placed fourth (21:22) just ahead of Northampton’s Maeve O’Neil (21:24). While Northampton placed sixth and seventh with Anna Zamar (21:40) and Tess Geis-Benton (21:43), Amherst’s fourth finisher Isla Cusick (22:04) and fifth runner Claire Kennedy (23:o2), who finished eighth and tenth, respectively, sealed the win.
“Isla moved up in the last mile of the race and closed down really strong and probably secured the win,” Amherst girls head coach Ron Jacobs said. “Claire… made a wrong turn and had to backtrack out there a little bit and still was able to close really strong and finish. In a close meet like this, it is really the four and the five [runners] that determine the meet, and they they both did their jobs fantastically.”
Schilling celebrated with Byl-Brann near the finish line when Jacobs told the two top runners that they’d won the meet. They knew they were coming in with a chance to win, but weren’t sure which team would have the better performance – especially on a tough course that the Hurricanes hadn’t raced on yet.
“I knew we had the chance to win and I knew we could do it, I was just nervous (about) executing it and really doing it,” Schilling said.
“Running is so unpredictable, especially with courses and weather, you never know,” Byl-Brann added. “Some people can just have an off day or a great day. And you never know whose team they’re going to be on.”
On the boys side, pack running was key to the Blue Devils’ success. Though Pinero-Jacome won the race for the Hurricanes, Northampton finished second through fifth, and those four runners all crossed the line within 22 seconds of each other. King-Pollet (17:32) took second, followed by Jude Mourad (17:46), Davis Wheat (17:51) and Jack Kamins (17:54).
“The team’s race plan was do exactly what we did – it was to pack up, to run together, to work off each other and pick them off one by one,” King-Pollet said. “That pack running strategy has been more important than ever. We’ve got a lot of guys who are similar speeds right now. We have a lot of guys who love to work together. We’re all really close together, we have a great bond.”
Though it didn’t look as close as the girls meet on paper, Amherst had a pack of its own right behind Northampton’s crew. The Hurricanes technically placed their five scoring runners before the Blue Devils — Sam Woodruff (17:58) and Diego Lopez (18:02) were right behind Kamins in sixth and seventh, and Aidan Bergeron (18:19) and Kyle Yanko (18:26) rounded out the scoring.
Though the win was nice for Northampton, especially after falling to the Hurricanes in last year’s regular season meeting, head coach Eric Pfalzgraf was especially excited about his team’s time on a hilly and difficult course.
“A lot of people had bad days last year and a lot of the returners remember last year, too… I’m just a competitive person, so it definitely does feel good to win against Amherst,” Pfalzgraf said. “We knew they’d be great competition, so I think it just helped to have a very, very good team to go against today. We had our top four guys all get course PRs, and the top four were definitely under 18 minutes, so to have our top four running 17s on our course, which is hard, is good.”