Masciarelli ready to make mark on national stage
THOMPSON – Last year, Emily Gaudet heard there was a ninth-grader coming into Marianapolis Prep who had won the Massachusetts middle school cross country state championship.
Gaudet, who has been the cross country and track coach for the last six years, was pretty excited. That is, until that freshman, Sydney Masciarelli, arrived and Gaudet found out she was playing soccer in the fall.
“What?” Gaudet said.
She didn’t have to worry. All through the fall on the soccer field, Masciarelli would watch her twin brother Salvatore run cross country. She wished she was running, too. So this fall, she did.
And in her first year of the sport in high school, Masciarelli has quietly gone far beyond what anybody expected. On Nov. 24, the Marianapolis Prep sophomore from Northbridge, Mass., won the Foot Locker Northeast Regional championship at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, pulling away from defending champion Marlee Star liper of Wellsville, Pa., in the last 1,000 meters.
Masciarelli finished in 17:12.60, the fastest time since Cathy (Schiro) O’Brien set the course record (16:46) in 1984 and the third fastest time at the event. O’Brien was a two-time Olympic marathoner. The third-place finisher, Grace Connolly of Natick, Mass., is going to run at Stanford next fall.
With the win, Masciarelli
qualified for the Foot Locker National Championship Dec. 8 in San Diego. She also announced herself on the national high school running scene.
And she didn’t even run her hardest.
“It was kind of slower the first two miles than I usually run,” Masciarelli said. “I felt pretty good the whole time. Then toward the end, me and another girl broke off from the third place girl. It was a sprint to the end.
“I felt like I had a lot of energy left.” Masciarelli comes from an athletic family; her father Stephen played football at American International College, her older brother Stefan is the leading scorer for the Lasell College basketball team and her older sister Sophia is the No. 1 runner as a freshman for the Hofstra cross country team.
Salvatore is her workout partner at Marianapolis, where he is also a sophomore.
“My sister and I are very competitive with each other,” Sydney Masciarelli said. “I always want to beat her. Her being faster than me for a couple years pushed me to want to be better than her. Also, my twin brother, I always want to beat him.”
When Stefan and Sophia ran cross country in middle school, their mother Loanny helped coach the team at Our Lady of the Valley, a K-8 school in Uxbridge, Mass. She brought Sydney and Sal along and asked if they could run with the team. They were in third grade.
Sydney was the No. 3 runner on the team. By fifth grade, she was No. 1.
“When they were little, she played with her brother on an all-boys soccer team,” Loanny said. “They played until sixth grade together. Same with basketball. She was the only girl to try out. There were 100 boys for 30 roster spots. I took her and said, ‘Go try out with your brother.’ They saw her and said, ‘We’re taking her.’ ”
Her soccer coach recommended Marianapolis Prep, so she went there. She scored 21 goals her freshman year. At 5 feet 10, she is also the starting point guard for the basketball team and is already getting looks from Division I schools, including Yale, Pennsylvania, George Washington and Sacred Heart.
But after running track in the spring — ending her season with the No. 1 freshman time of 10:49.15 in the 2 mile at the New Balance Outdoor National championships — she decided to continue running in the fall.
Her first meet was the Canterbury Invitational. Masciarelli set the course record, finishing in 17:04.
“I knew I was going to do pretty well, but I didn’t expect to run the times I have been running because I took a little break from it,” Masciarelli said. “I knew it would take a while to get back into cross country shape because track is a lot different.”
A number of Marianapolis’ races were rained out this season. But when Masciarelli ran, nobody else was even close. She won the New England Prep School Athletic Council Division IV title.
And then it was on to Foot Locker. The first three-quarters of a mile, Gaudet could see her. Then Masciarelli went into the woods and didn’t emerge again until there were 1,000 meters left.
“I was standing at the exit of the woods, just waiting,” Gaudet said. “I have no idea what’s going to happen. When she came out and she was leading, I just lost my mind. It was so exciting.
“There were so many people around the finish line. I actually didn’t know she had won until 20-30 seconds after.”
At regionals, it was all about qualifying, and Gaudet had Masciarelli run more conservatively. Now, it’s time to go all out.
“We’ve had conversations about this. It’s probably going to be the race she’ll have to run harder than she ever has. She always finishes and she’s so relaxed,” Gaudet said. “Everybody comes across the finish line and they’re dropping … and it’s clear she hasn’t exerted herself to the fullest extent. We talked about what she should feel like at the end of the nationals.”