Meet of Champions Qualifiers, Prep School Rivalries, and More
The big news today was the announcement of the Meet of Champions wildcard entries! See the list of Mercer County qualifiers below, along with a few more thoughts about yesterday’s Group Championships. In other action yesterday, Peddie and Lawrenceville runners dropped fast times against their schools’ archrivals from outside of the county.
MoC Qualifiers
Congrats to the Mercer County runners who qualified for the Meet of Champions! The following runners earned automatic qualification for winning their group (as a team) or finishing in the Top 10 (as an individual):
Princeton girls (Kajol Karra, Grace Hegedus, Ewoyn Deess, Florica Eleches-Lipsitz, Phoenix Roth, Rosemary Warren, Sevanne Knoch)
Princeton Day boys (Grayson McLaughlin, Edward Letko, Alexander Chia, Luke Nolte, Michael Zhou, Jasper Mackey, Cy Cooper)
Allison Lee (WW-P North)
Zui Chinchalkar (WW-P North)
Claire Dumont (Hopewell Valley)
Laura Sallade (Wilberforce)
Adeline Edwards (Wilberforce)
Stella Blanchard (Wilberforce)
Shravan Pradeep (WW-P South)
Elias Edwards (Wilberforce)
NJSIAA also hands out wildcard qualifications for some teams and individuals, though it’s a convoluted process that makes the wildcard qualifiers not immediately apparent. So the following runners had to wait in suspense for about 24 hours before getting the exciting news:
Hopewell Valley girls (Dumont, Sydney Young, Maddie LaChance, Anna Wilson, Sophia Pellegrino, Elsie Rey-de-Castro, Lainie Smith)
Teagan Walker (Ewing)
Emilia Wroblewski (Allentown)
Burke Thompson (Hightstown)
Tarun Kovoor (Notre Dame)
Felix Farrugia (Princeton)
First off, congrats to all the seniors who produced one of their best races ever to qualify for the Meet of Champions and end their official high school XC careers on a high note! And a special congrats to the seniors who made it to the MoC for the first time after years of trying: Pradeep, Kovoor, Farrugia, Walker, and Wroblewski. This is the senior Thompson’s first trip to MoC too, but it’s also just his first year of XC – which is impressive in its own way!
It’s also incredible how many of these Mercer County runners barely snuck into the MoC. The Hopewell Valley girls got the very last team wildcard! In addition, Walker qualified by 6 seconds, Wroblewski by 5 seconds, Kovoor by 3 seconds, and Farrugia by just 1 second! And these weren’t close calls because of off days — rather, almost all of these runners ran big PRs and exceeded expectations to make it in.
Group Championship Merge
The Princeton girls finished second in the merge, behind nationally-ranked Union Catholic. They were actually only 46 points behind Union Catholic, though UC rested one of their runners and had two others not be able to finish the race. The merge also reveals that Princeton’s 1-5 split of 1:00 was the second-tightest split out of all 104 teams (and the fastest out of any team in the top 35). Princeton’s seventh runner beat the fifth runner of all but two teams in the meet. That’s lots of displacement!
Hopewell Valley finished 13th in the merged results, which was super impressive for a team not ranked in the Top 20 by NJ.com, MileSplit, or the Garden State Track Club. (Though, to be fair, those rankers may not have realized that Sydney Young was back.) West Windsor-Plainsboro North finished 16th, also greatly exceeding expectations. Only GSTC had them in the Top 20, at 17th. Thanks to Allison Lee and Zui Chinchalkar up front, they actually averaged faster than Hopewell Valley, 20:18 to 20:25.
The boys merge shows how evenly matched the top Mercer County teams are:
| School | Place | Points | Avg. Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| WW-P North | 20th | 751 | 17:20.6 |
| WW-P South | 21st | 803 | 17.20.2 |
| Hopewell Valley | 28th | 1077 | 17:41.0 |
| Princeton | 32nd | 1117 | 17:43.4 |
While there is more of a gap between the first two and the second two, none of those gaps are immense. There were 826 runners in the merge overall, and a single finisher in the high-17 to low-18 range can swing 20 points in just 5 seconds.
The fifth Mercer County team in the merge was Notre Dame, who finished 48th with an 18:02 average. That was just ahead of Steinert, who was 54th with an 18:08 average.
Halfway Team Scores at Group Championships
Results alone can’t tell you how runners paced themselves throughout the 5K, but actually watching the race leads to some fun insights. For instance, for the top teams in the girls Group 3 race, here were the team scores going up the Bowl, at roughly the halfway point of the race:
| Team Scores at Halfway | |
|---|---|
| Middletown South | 109 |
| Hopewell Valley | 114 |
| Colts Neck | 126 |
| Moorestown | 141 |
| Ocean City | 141 |
| WW-P North | 144 |
| North Hunterdon | 173 |
By the end, here is where their scores ended up:
| Team Scores at Finish | |
|---|---|
| Colts Neck | 89 |
| Middletown South | 100 |
| Ocean City | 137 |
| Hopewell Valley | 144 |
| WW-P North | 152 |
| Moorestown | 154 |
| North Hunterdon | 161 |
Hopewell Valley got out very hard and were almost in first place halfway through the race! That strategy worked out well: Although they somewhat fell off the pace over the second half, they were able to hold on long enough to secure fourth place and nab the last MoC team wildcard. It’s also interesting that team champion Colts Neck took the opposite approach, starting out conservatively and then hitting the gas over the last half of the race.
West Windsor-Plainsboro North maintained their places over the last 2.5K and closed the gap on Hopewell Valley considerably, but they just ran out of real estate. If the race was just 400m longer, things might have played out differently – which goes to show how close these teams are.
There was less movement in the girls Group 4 race. Here were the approximate team scores at about halfway:
| Team Scores at Halfway | |
|---|---|
| Princeton | 91 |
| Ridgewood | 113 |
| Cherokee | 119 |
| Freehold Township | 155 |
| Manalapan | 166 |
| Cherry Hill East | 193 |
| Westfield | 198 |
And here were the scores at the finish:
| Team Scores at Finish | |
|---|---|
| Princeton | 84 |
| Ridgewood | 95 |
| Cherokee | 118 |
| Freehold Township | 121 |
| Manalapan | 149 |
| Cherry Hill East | 171 |
| Westfield | 189 |
By the halfway point, Princeton already had its 7th girl ahead of the 4th girl of every team except Ridgewood. Ridgewood’s 5th girl moved up about 10 places over the last half to make the race closer, but that was countered by Princeton’s Florica Eleches-Lipsitz and Phoenix Roth also catching several girls by the end.
Prep School Rivalry Days
Peddie and Lawrenceville had Prep States and the MAPL Championship last week, but they each capped their season this week with a race that is possibly more meaningful: rivalry day. At the end of each season, each school faces off against its MAPL archrival – that’s Blair Academy for Peddie and the Hill School for Lawrenceville – in every sport all on the same day. Whichever school wins the most sports gets to keep the trophy and the bragging rights. These are historic rivalries – Peddie and Blair have been going at it since 1903! Both Peddie’s and Lawrenceville’s XC teams did their part to beat their rivals this year.
The Peddie boys beat the Blair boys, 21-40. Seniors James Hamnett and Baker Pott went 1-2 and both broke 17:00, with Hamnett at 16:44 and Pott at 16:57. Their top 5 average was 17:24 on the slightly modified course, which does two miles on the Peddie Golf Course before winding onto campus and finishing on the track. The Peddie girls won 20-38. Senior Matilda Kardhashi took the win with a massive PR of 18:35! She’s had a huge breakout season. Two other seniors ended their high school XC careers with speedy times: Eliza Lamar took 2nd in 19:22, and Courtney Cane returned to action with a 19:30 for 3rd in her first race since September. See more results here.
The Lawrenceville boys beat the Hill School 21-40. They were led by Taksh Gupta, who won and set a new record of 16:22 on the Lawrenceville course (as modified after 2022 construction). Arunav Sarkar outkicked Hill’s top runner for 2nd place in 16:44, just five seconds off the prior course record. The Lawrenceville girls beat the Hill girls, 19-41, to complete the sweep. Junior Essie Chafin led the way in 19:57, running a 30-second PR to break 20:00 for the first time. See full results here.