By Senior Correspondent Marty Ogden, Editing and Graphics by Ron Knapp
The season has warmed up just like the weather on Saturday with three cross country meets taking place in Connecticut with the largest, the 35th Wilton Invitational, the 12th Connecticut River Valley Invitational in Cromwell and the 12th Harry Geraghty Invite in South Windsor on Friday. While these are early season meets and a long way away from the Class meets and the Open in late October, they are indicators of who put in a solid summer of training.
35th Wilton XC Invitational
Allen’s Meadows, Wilton CT
GIRLS VARSITY 4K
Six of the top ten girls teams in the Marathon Sports CT High School Coaches XC Pre-season Girls Poll traveled to compete on Allen’s Meadows 4000m course over fields and trails. Greenwich, the defending Class LL and State Open champions lost their top three runners from that team but obviously reloaded as they came away with a close win over top ranked Glastonbury by a score of 105 to 118 points in the 22 team field.
Girls Varsity 4k Race Finish
Greenwich was led by freshman Sophie Passalacqua who finished in 8th place in a time of 15:43.38 with junior Margaret McCooe, a member of the Cardinals’s All New England 4x800m team in her first season of cross country finishing a second behind in 9th place. Greenwich was able to pack their five scoring runners in the top 40 with only a minute and six second gap.
But don’t count out top ranked Glastonbury yet as they still have Brooke Strauss, the 2022 State Open champion in the line up and she has had her best summer of training in her life. Strauss not only won her 4th straight Wilton title, she broke Sarah Cotton’s 15 year old course record with her time of 13:45.71. In her three previous years of high school, Strauss placed 2nd in the Open her freshman and junior years and her time on Saturday was 1:02 faster than she ran two years ago when she won the Open. Runner-up Sloan Wasserman of John Jay High was 6th at the NY Federation meet last year hung with Strauss for the first half of the race and finished seven seconds behind. The Guardians also did not run two others in the top five who have minor injuries and should be back next week.
Glastonbury always seems to find the next generation of talent and finishing 11 seconds ahead of Strauss’ freshman time was 9th grader Lauren Parrett who crossed the line in 14:48.82. Not far behind was All New England runner Charlotte Moor of New Canaan who got…
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