Sherry makes his move late to win Club championship
Gavin Sherry, a junior at Conard from West Hartford, won the Northeast Club Cross Country championship in 15:13.7 over a muddy 5,000-meter course on a farm in Montgomery, N.Y., Saturday.
Sherry, last year’s State Open and New England champion in cross country, took the lead for good up a hill in the last 1,000 meters of the race, beating runner-up Peyton Geehrer from Manlius, N.Y., who finished 10 seconds behind Sherry. Nicholas Bendtsen of Wolcott was third (15:27.0) and Sherry’s twin brother Callum finished sixth (15:33.4).
Kate Wiser, a senior from Pomperaug, won the girls race in 16:46.8. Marianapolis Prep senior Sydney Masciarelli of Northbridge, Mass., finished third (17:20.1) and Chloe Scrimgeour, a Conard senior from West Hartford, fourth (17:43.7).
The meet drew runners from Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania who competed as non-affiliated runners as the meet was not sanctioned by the National Federation of High Schools or the Connecticut Inter
scholastic Athletic Conference.
In the boys race, Geehrer and Sherry took off right from the start.
“He was probably 10 feet in front of us for about the first mile,” Sherry said. “We took it out really fast.”
Sherry took the lead in the
second mile and held it until closer to the end when Geehrer passed him.
“We were battling, sort of,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we had dropped most of the field by a decent amount, but I wasn’t really looking. It was intense. The last 1K
was a hill and then you do a little loop before you finish. I ended up taking the lead on the hill. It was fun.”
It was Sherry’s first cross country invitational race of the season after all the invitationals in the state were canceled due to COVID19. He ran at invitational track meets this year in New York and New Jersey, but there hasn’t been a lot offered on the cross country side, regionally. The Connecticut high schools did have a cross country season but it was abbreviated and confined to regional dual meets and there were no CCC championships and no state championships.
“I’m really grateful for [Saturday’s race],” Sherry said.
Wiser broke the course record at Wickham Park last year in winning the Class L championship and finished second at the State Open. She will run at Notre Dame next year.
Masciarelli won the 2018 Foot Locker national championship as a sophomore. She will run at North Carolina next year.
Scrimgeour, who will run at Georgetown next year, is in her first year of cross country and Saturday was her first invitational. She started far back but rallied to finish fourth. She had run outdoor track, then quit basketball to run indoor track last winter and won the Class L 1,600 and 3,200 championships and the State Open 3,200 title.