Hall, Conard battle
Scrimgeour, running in 1st season, wins girls race
Normally dual meets aren’t the biggest meets of the cross country season. But when the Hall and Conard boys and girls teams squared off Thursday at Hall, there was more than bragging rights at stake for the crosstown rivals - it could have been the biggest meet of the year, and there were plenty of top performances.
Gavin Sherry, the best cross country runner in the state last year, won the boys race. Chloe Scrimgeour won the girls race.
It’s her first cross country season, although she ran track two years and is going to run at Georgetown next year.
Hall beat the Conard boys, last year’s State Open runner-up, by a point, 29-30. Sherry, a Conard junior, wonthe 5,000-meter race in 15 minutes, 5 seconds. Scrimgeour, a Conard senior, set the 4,000meter course record, winning in 13:33 but Hall, the State Open champion last year, won the girls team race, 24-34.
Normally, dual meets are not emphasized on the cross country schedule as much as invitationals or the postseason. Hall-Conard may be a little different than most, because of the talent involved and the crosstown rivalry.
Thursday’s meet at Hall High could have been both teams’ biggest meet of the season. Each team only has five or six dual meets scheduled. The postseason is still up in the air, with potential regional championships to be held, but there will not be state championships or a State Open. Everything’s up in the air.
So the Conard and Hall runners enjoyed the day.
“I’m happy to do this,” said
Sherry, who won the State Open and New England cross country titles as a sophomore last year. “This is awesome. This brings back the cross country vibes.”
The weather was perfect, cool and dry. Scrimgeour took an early lead and never looked back in her first cross country race, winning by almost a minute over Hall’s Nora Holmes (14:21) and Kate Sanderson (14:22).
Scrimgeour ran track her freshman and sophomore seasons and played basketball in the winter and soccer in the fall. She decided to compete during indoor season last winter instead of basketball and was planning on playing soccer this fall.
“I was supposed to be a soccer captain this year,” she said. “But because of the pandemic and not getting an outdoor season, I just wanted to run. I love soccer. I was telling myself I’d do soccer through high school because I wasn’t going to do it after high school. I’ve been training since indoor. I need to do cross country.
“This is better than doing time trials on your own. This is probably our biggest meet of the season, which is weird, because normally you’d have states and State Opens.”
The Hall girls returned a number of top runners from the team that won the State Open and Class LLtitles last year. They’re training, just like everybody else, but for what?
“It’s bigger yes, because there’s not muchelse that we could maybe look forward to this year,” Hall coach Betty Remigino-Knapp said before the race. “This is one of our more challenging meets. They’re really excited about racing today.”
Holmes said her perspective has changed since the spring when everything was canceled due to the pandemic.
“We were supposed to be going to New Balance [Indoor] Nationals but they canceled it basically the day of. That was really rough,” she said. “I kept telling myself, if you don’t get outdoor track, you’ll have cross country, and then that became iffy. I think at this point, any chance I have to run and just be with my team, I’m grateful for that.”
In the boys race, Conard’s Tyler Remigino was second (15:45) and Hall junior Walker Beverly third (15:47), finishing about 45 seconds faster than his coach Jeff Billing thought he would and Billing was pretty happy
after the race.
“It’s incredible,” Billing said. “I told the boys this was an amazing opportunity and I didn’t know howmany opportunities we would have this year.
“We knew [Beverly] is in good shape. Their top two have always been ahead of him. If an opening occurs and he can sneak into the top three and our pack can do what they can do - you tell them to dream. Our guys showed up here with no pressure and a little dream and it all fell into place amazingly.”