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Stuart Cross Country Shows Heart In Taking 6th Patriot Championship
by Bill Alden
Tom Harrington was a worried man as his Stuart Country Day School cross country team took the starting line last Wednesday at the Patriot Conference championship meet.
Although the Tartans had won the Patriot title the last five years, the seventh-year head coach knew his team was going into battle at Gill St. Bernard's with a bull's eye on its back and several of its runners in pain before the race even started.
"We had every injury you could imagine from the waist down, hips, knees, ankles, shins," lamented Harrington, who had Laura Brienza dealing with a groin injury, Nicole Huber struggling with a knee injury, Caroline Cancelosi with a hip issue, and Elizabeth Cancelosi with sore shins.
"I told the girls that their opponents could care less about your injuries, they are coming to run hard. The only people that care about you are your teammates, fans, and family. I'm getting old and gray but these girls are making me older, grayer, and bald."
By the end of the race, however, it was Stuart's top gun, the hale and hearty Emily Driscoll, who had everyone else pulling out their hair as she cruised past the field to finish first to lead Stuart to the title.
The scintillating senior Driscoll added another line to her glittering resume as she covered the 3.1 mile course in a school-record 19:31.
Brienza took seventh in 20:49 and Catherine Currie placed eighth in 21:44 as Stuart edged second-place Saddle River 46-48 in the team standings.
Harrington was heartened by the way his runners dug deep to keep the program's title streak alive.
"I knew Saddle River was good and that they were going after us," said Harrington. "Teams are automatically out to get you when you're a five-time champion. I was concerned. I'm proud of the girls. I told them afterward that championships aren't always won with the body but sometimes with the heart."
Stuart's frontrunner, Driscoll, though, posses a lethal combination of physical and mental attributes.
"Emily is in cruise control," said Harrington with a laugh. "The things that she did this summer with her personal trainer, in working on developing her abs, really worked. I'm going to try to get all my runners to get on that routine. She has a really good mental outlook. She wants to run her hardest and best to create as good a resume as possible."
Driscoll, whose older sister, Sarah, plays field hockey and lacrosse at Yale, is determined to run at the college level and is looking at schools like Bucknell, Penn, Richmond, and Lafayette.
In the meantime, Driscoll is pushing her teammates to new heights. "They have followed her lead," said Harrington in assessing Driscoll's impact on her teammates. "Laura and Catherine run with her in practice and the three of them push each other every day."
The team's second group has been pushing themselves as well. "I've spent a lot of time working with the second pack to get them tighter," explained Harrington.
"They were 15 seconds apart at the Rutgers Prep meet which is the closest they've been this season. We've cut the distance between third and fourth in half, going from around 1:45 to 45 seconds."
The key performer in that second pack at the Patriot meet was Saskia Van Nieuwenhuse. "Saskia has been running No. 5 for us but I told her before the meet that with our injuries, I would need her to be fourth," recalled Harrington, whose team edged Blair 25-30 last Saturday to improve to 10-0 in dual meets.
"She wasn't sure she could do it but she did. The girl from Saddle River that had beaten her by 1:30 earlier only beat her by four or five seconds on Wednesday."
The next big goal for the Tartans is the state Prep B meet on November 3 at Blair. Stuart has won that meet the last two seasons and four times in the last six years.
Harrington acknowledges that he faces an uphill battle in getting his runners ready to add that title to its trophy case.
"In the next three weeks we need to get healthy," said Harrington, whose team will sharpen up for the prep championship meet by racing Lawrenceville School on October 20.
"We're going to have to do some base work, we won't be able to do all the speed work we normally would do in this part of the season. I may have to do different workouts for the healthy runners and the recovering runners. Unless we get healthy, it's going to be tough to win the states."
Based
on how Stuart gutted it out at the Patriot meet, the Tartans may once
again have Harrington smiling even as his hair turns whiter.
