Conard’s Liv and Tess Sherry finished in the top five in the girls cross country race on Thursday.

2024 Connecticut State Open Cross Country Championship. Oct. 31, 2024. Photo credit: Craig Rosenberg

By Fox Mace

After a long and injury riddled season, West Hartford’s Hall High School was able to qualify both a boys and girls varsity team to compete in the Connecticut State Open Cross Country meet. To compete in the State Open meet, a team has to either be top two in their respective State Class meet or qualify for an at-large bid by running one of the top team times in the state.

At the State Class meet the previous weekend, Hall’s boys placed third in the LL division and took the second at-large bid available –qualifying them for the race amidst a historically fast year for Connecticut Boys’ teams. The girls qualified with the eighth at large-bid and finished fifth in the Class L race.

2024 Connecticut State Open Cross Country Championship. Oct. 31, 2024. Photo credit: Craig Rosenberg

Along with Hall High School’s qualifiers, West Hartford’s Conard High School was able to qualify a girls varsity team and Grant Bigger was able to qualify individually for the Open.

At this point in the season, the Hall boys were seeded as the seventh team in the state, putting them one spot outside of the six teams that qualify for New Englands. However, at the Open the team would be running without Ben Lewis and Fox Mace who had been instrumental to the team’s success in the earlier stages of the season. Filling in those roles would be Max Prince and Hikari Mizuno, looking to help support the five other athletes stepping to the line in this high-stakes postseason race.

The team’s success so far had been dependent on a very low spread of the scoring athletes on the team. Jonah Schulman and Johnny Dewander had stepped up and kept the team spread to less than 30 seconds at the Class LL meet the week prior. Unfortunately, this would be the third week in a row where a different group of boys stepped up to the line and without Lewis and Mace, keeping the spread that low would be a difficult task leaving a lot of pressure on the alternates stepping up to race.

The State Open was posed to be a very interesting team race at the top end, where East Lyme and Ridgefield would duke it out as the top two teams in Connecticut looking for the championship title. Behind them, however, it was going to be a dead heat of teams racing for the four other qualifying spots. E.O. Smith, Danbury, Staples, Hall, Norwich Free Academy (NFA), and Greenwich were all in contention to qualify for New Englands the next week. From an individual standpoint, the top athlete was far and away expected to be Soheib Dissa, who has run well below 15 minutes during the 2024 season.

2024 Connecticut State Open Cross Country Championship. Oct. 31, 2024. Photo credit: Craig Rosenberg

With the meet scheduled for the morning due to record high temperatures forecast for later in the day, the gun went off at 10 a.m. on Thursday and Wickham Park was a battlefield once again as the teams sprinted off the line towards the first hills of the course.

Dissa led the pack through the mile mark in 5 minutes flat and the first Hall pack came through between 5:18 and 5:28. The Hall boys had set themselves up with the other teams to have a chance over the next 2.1 miles of the course. Donovan Connole led the group of West Hartford boys from the start, followed by Jonah Schulman, Thijs Doot ,and Johnny Dewander. They came flying up the final hill towards the finish and crossed the line in 16:40, 16:52, 16:55, and 16:59 respectively. This group of boys ran phenomenally over the 3.1 mile course the question was how fast could Hall’s fifth man run.

Max Prince sprinted up the final hill to finish in a time of 17:44 with a 19-second cross country personal best. This was a fantastic performance for the junior and, on a day where Hall did not have everyone healthy, put the team in seventh place. Hall finished four points behind Danbury and unfortunately missed out on New Englands. The takeaway from the race, however, was not defeat but pride in the way the boys that got to the line raced. Unfortunately, this ends the cross country season for Hall – but this is anything but a sad ending to the 2024 cross country season.

The girls race shortly followed and West Hartford competed in both the team and top individual races.

Liv and Tess Sherry of Conard were in the lead pack from the gun as the seniors looked to take home a win in their final season of high school cross country. Liv managed to finish second in a time of 18:34 followed closely by her sister Tess who came in at 18:48 for fourth place.

The Hall girls team, led by Abby Sanderson, was able to put up a solid performance coming in a respectable 10th place. The team’s sophomore, Lucy Vargas, had an exceptional race finishing in 21:02 which put Hall ahead of their rival town team Conard. The other scoring members for Hall were Maddy Peterson, Anya Mantripragada, and Claire Furia. 

West Hartford in all had a solid performance at the 2024 State Open meet and represented well against the top schools in the state. Both teams Conard and Hall will continue to train and build off of this season and will look to perform well in the upcoming track seasons.

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