“Pure joy,” senior Sam Frizell said after the boys’ varsity cross country team won the city championship at Van Cortlandt Park on Saturday, November 11.
This was the team’s third city championship win in four years. All seven members of the varsity team ran personal records on the five-kilometer course.
Sophomore Daniel Hyman-Cohen was the top Stuyvesant finisher, placing third with a time of 17:2.84. Stuyvesant earned a total of 60 points after members of the varsity team placed within the top 31 finishers. Six of the seven runners ran the course in under 18 minutes.
“This team was much deeper. It was the strongest seven that I have ever had,” coach Mark Mendes said.
“Well, it was a very close race. We kept passing each other, top four. I actually thought I was going to win for a minute or two,” Hyman-Cohen said.
Curtis senior Paul Larocca won the race in a time of 16:53.23. McKee/Staten Island Tech placed in second in the team standings (85 points). Midwood placed third (102 points).
Team scoring is based on how each runner on each team places in the standings. For example, the first finisher earns one point. The team with the lowest point total wins the championship.
Stuyvesant won its first championship since 2005. Last year, Curtis defeated Stuyvesant by three points. “We had a better and solid season planned [this year] and we really peaked in this race,” said senior Ted Westling, who placed ninth with a time of 17:29.58, one minute 24 seconds faster than his former personal record.
The win follows Stuyvesant’s Manhattan Borough Championship victory two weeks earlier when they took six of the top 10 spots in the race.
“There was a lot of nervousness before the race. I came in and said, ‘I don’t know if we are going to win,’” Frizell said.
“Our strategy was to not start out too quick, stay with most of the top guys going into the hills, and pass as many guys as we can going home,” said junior Eleazar Jacobs, who ran in his first varsity city championship and ran the race in 18:00.04, improving his time last year by two minutes.
Senior Robert Daniels led the junior varsity team to their fourth straight city championship after Daniels won the race in a time of 18:22.62. “[Midwood junior Garvenchy Nicholas] was behind me and he was persistent actually. But in the end I managed to outkick him,” Daniels said. “My aim was to win, not to have a personal record.”
This was Mendes’s third city championship title. With five seniors being part of this year’s varsity team, “The fact that we weren’t the favorites going in, the progress we made and that we were so senior-dominated made it memorable.”