Cross Country B

Deerfield Academy

Date/Time Home/Away Type Field Location Score
10/31/2009 10:45 AM Away Game Andover 19 Deerfield 40

Andover runs away from Deerfield

 

 

            ANDOVER VS DEERFIELD    Saturday, October 31, 2009

 

Varsity score:  Andover 19    Deerfield 40

 

As we prepared for this weekend’s race, we studied results from two of Deerfield’s previous races, the first against Loomis Chaffee and Choate Rosemary Hall together, then last weekend’s race against Exeter.  The Deerfield course is flat and fast, but the conditions varied wildly between these two earlier raced.  The first was run on a cool, dry day, and the solid footing made the times very impressive.  For Exeter, the course was sodden, the air full of rain.  The conditions for our race fell somewhere between these extremes: the ground was muddy and wet, and the runners had to make two trips through a small pond, but the air was pleasant with only a little spitting rain.

 

Our goal was to take six of the top seven spots, and that is what the Andover varsity accomplished.  The race began with the entire field knotted.  Renat Zalov allowed Deerfield’s Belcher to set the pace on the first loop, just over a mile, but by the time they clawed their way out from the pond, Zalov had a small lead.  The Andover pack surrounded three more Deerfield runners with Tim McLaughlin and Matt Appleby leading the way and Nick Kearns and James Hamilton at the tail.  Neither Kearns nor Hamilton relish fast starts, and this was a fast start.

 

As they crossed the bridge to the outer loop, the Andover team began a steady move that set up their dominance in the final loop.  Zalov began to open his lead, and Kearns and Hamilton gradually moved on the Deerfield second and third runners.  By the time Kearns started on the third loop, he had passed, the re-passed Deerfield’s second runner, and Hamilton was taking aim on him as well.  Most of the team found the squishy mud of the second loop very tiring, but on the third, longer loop, they began to reestablish their strides.  Appleby moved comfortably into second place and Kearns moved up to third while McLaughlin faded a little.  Patrick Wolber had been near the front of the pack through two loops, but fell back to sixth place in the final one. Hamilton passed two Deerfield runners and held his lead over them to the finish. In the final six hundred meters Andover kicked home well, tightening their pack so they finished tightly, just thirty seconds separating our second and sixth runners.  Zalov won the race in 16:16 with Deerfield’s Belcher six seconds behind.  Matt Appleby finished in 16:36, Nick Kearns in 16:40, Tim McLaughlin in 16:47, Patrick Wolber in 16:54, and James Hamilton in 17:06.  Four Deerfield runners followed Hamilton, then Andover’s next three – Chris Batchelder, Billy Murran, and Kian Ivey – crossed well ahead of Deerfield’s sixth and seventh.

 

This was a good race for an Andover team that has trained for seventeen days without a race.  Now we can turn our attention to the much-improved Exeter team, to hills, and eventually to Interschols.

 

JV Score:   Deerfield24   Andover 33

 

With our JV team severely depleted by illness and injury, we entered the race wary but confident because  Ben Ho was ready to run his first race of the season after a promising start that soon landed him with the trainers for six weeks.  A pair of Deerfield runners took an early lead and opened it wider through the first two loops, and five more green shirts managed to keep the Andover runners from making progress until near the end of the second lap when all the Andover runners began to move.  Ben Talarico led the way for Andover and appeared to be gaining on the two leaders as they headed into the final loop.  As it turned out, they would finish eleven and seven seconds ahead of him.  Ho surprised his coaches and himself by moving up in the pack during the first loop, then holding his ground through the second.  By that time, he knew he would be fine for the whole race and he finished comfortably, seven seconds behind Talarico.  The most impressive movement came from ninth grader Larry Flynn, who clawed his way past five Deerfeld runners in the final third of the race to finish just three seconds behind Ho.  The race was won by Deerfield’s third, fourth, and fifth runners who came in behind Flynn and ahead of Yu Sakai, and two more Deerfield runners edged Andover’s fifth Fernando Ramos to displace.  It’s worth mentioning that if Murran and Ivey, who ran in the varsity race as eighth and ninth Andover runners, had run in the second race, Andover would have taken the race with just twenty-three points.