November 6, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

GFS cross country finals
by TOM UTESCHER

After the Germantown Friends boys’ team finished first and the girls’ team second at the PA Independent School Cross-Country Championships on Oct. 25., both squads showed off their newly won hardware at Mercersburg Academy, the site of the event.

The boys’ and girls’ cross-country teams from Germantown Friends School each put an exclamation point at the end of their 2008 seasons. At the Friends School League Championships on Oct. 21, the Tigers won both the boys’ and the girls’ team titles for the seventh year in a row.

On Oct. 25, both groups traveled to Mercersburg Academy in central Pennsylvania for the 2008 PA Independent School Championships. There, the boys’ team seized the state crown for a third straight year, topping their league rival, Friends Central, 28-57. The GFS girls, who won the league championship last season, finished second to a strong outfit from the Academy of Notre Dame, 29-85.

In the boys’ race, the individual winner in a time of 16 minutes, five seconds was senior Matt McCullough from Inter-Ac League champion Malvern Prep, but the second Malvern runner didn’t turn up until 27th place. With all five scorers in the top 16, GFS easily outdistanced Friends Central in the team tally, while the Hill School was third with 97 points, and Malvern was fourth with 122.

Even better news for Tigers fans is the fact that all the scorers at states were underclassmen, starting with junior Gus McKenzie, the overall runner-up. At the Friends League meet, McKenzie had taken second place to FC’s Patrick DeSabato, but this time he bested the Phoenix senior, coming in at 16:10 while DeSabato was three seconds behind in third-place.

It was a little worrying for GFS fans when Friends Central also took fourth place thanks to Ivo Milic-Straklj (16:17), who came in a second ahead of Chestnut Hill Academy’s rising star, freshman Dustin Wilson. After that, though, the Phoenix only put one more runner in the top 20 (19th-place Alex Sheltzer), and Germantown took over with its superior team depth.

None of this surprised GFS coach Rob Hewitt, who said that going in, “We felt Gus had a shot at winning the whole thing, but we also expected Friends Central to be up there with their top two guys. We felt that with our two, three, four and five we could outdistance any team we were going to race there. Our goal was to focus on our five-man gap.”

The interval between the Tigers’ first and fifth finishers was 62 seconds, roughly the same as in 2007. Two GFS juniors, Tom Waterman (16:32) and Ross Wistar (16:48), locked up seventh and ninth place respectively, then a pair of sophomores finished close together, with Evan Caldwell taking 15th place in 17:04, while Waterman’s brother, David, was 16th in 17:12. The other two GFS runners in the event were senior Fenn Hoffman (20th; 17:22) and junior Sam Butler (28th; 17:52).

“We went out hard, and we had six guys in the top 10 at the mile mark,” Hewitt related. “We didn’t worry too much about some of those guys falling back because the field [of runners] in the race wasn’t that deep.”

Germantown’s 2007 team had risen to national prominence, but the Tigers graduated the top three runners from that squad, Max Kaulbach, Jake McKenzie (Gus’ brother), and Isaac Ortiz.

“We kind of had to develop a new identity as a team,” Hewitt explained. “The three top juniors have taken on the role of leaders and have done well with it.”

In the girls’ race at Mercersburg, GFS junior Jasia Kaulbach (Max’s sister) finished in third place for the second year in a row, after winning the event as a freshman. Overall, times have been coming down at the state meet for the past few seasons, and the trend continued this year, even though it was a wet day out in Franklin County.

Back in the Friends League meet at Westtown School, Kaulbach had wrapped up her third straight individual championship, leading the Tigers to a comfortable victory.

At states, the plan was for her and senior Maddie Hawes to break up the lead pack of Notre Dame runners, then see where they could make a move in the later stages of the race. GFS entered seven runners altogether but only six finished; sophomore Ashleigh Frank, who’d been the Tigers’ third finisher at Lehigh University’s massive Paul Short Invitational, cramped up and had to drop out.

Notre Dame’s top two finishers from the Girls’ Inter-Ac League championships the previous Monday switched places at Mercersburg. Freshman Maria Seykora won in 19:14, and five seconds later eighth-grader Kathleen Fitzpatrick became the runner-up, while the Tigers’ Kaulbach came in third in 19:34. After Agnes Irwin senior Courtenay Devlin and Notre Dame freshman Caroline Powers captured the fourth and fifth spots, Hawes came in sixth for GFS at 20:23, and with a time of 20:40 Tigers 10th-grader Brooke Palus rounded out the top 10 overall.

“The times for the whole top 10 were fast,” pointed out Germantown coach Jeff Hayes. “Jasia had the same place that she did last year, but she actually ran almost a minute faster this time.”

With all five of their scorers in the top 14, the Irish of Notre Dame easily won the team title, and although GFS was making a strong bid for second, Germantown Academy and Agnes Irwin were showing signs of life farther back in the pack. Junior Molly Shapiro led the GA squad, placing eighth overall in 20:34.

“I was kind of scared at the finish line for a while, because I knew our fourth and fifth girls were back in the 30s,” revealed the Tigers’ Hayes. “I’d been keeping track of Notre Dame, but I didn’t have a good gauge on where GA and Agnes Irwin were.”

As it turned out, a placing of 31st from Katharine Celata (22:08) and 35th from fellow senior Taya Freidan (22:28) secured second place in the team standings for GFS, which had 85 points while GA and Irwin each finished with 99. (The sixth-place tiebreaker favored GA.) The sixth finisher for Germantown Friends was senior Camilla Warren, who came in 39th in 22:46.

It had been a good season for Kaulbach, who had consistently run under 20 minutes on a variety of 3.1-mile circuits. On the fast Lehigh University course, she was timed in 19:06 at the Paul Short meet.

“She has ambitions to run in college,” Hayes said, “so now she’s gotten some marks in cross-country that definitely will get the attention of some college coaches.”

While the GFS girls shift into winter training mode, the boys are preparing for one more major outdoor meet. On Nov. 29, they will race in the Nike Northeast Regional Cross Country Championships, which will be held at Bowdoin Park near Poughkeepsie, NY.

Both GFS squads have high hopes for the 2009 campaign, with many talented runners returning and with new ones rising from the GFS JV teams, which both had outstanding seasons this fall.