Sept. 16, meet vs. Dobbs Ferry at VCP. Overcast in the 70s.
Set…Go! and with those words, as the runners took off, history was made. For the first time since the 1970s Hamilton runners were competing in a cross country race. After about three weeks of training the Hamilton Harriers found themselves toeing the line at the storied Van Cortland Park.
It took us a while to get our bearings straight. We had to figure out where the starting and finish lines were not to mention the bathrooms. No one had even run the course before. Nonetheless, we managed to have a pretty good performance. The boys were led by Arnold who won the race in 15:59. Hashem followed in fourth with a 10:03. Allen seemed to be staking out his spot at #3 on the varsity squad with a seventh place finish of 18:02. Joji and Russell brought home the eighth and ninth places a meer two seconds apart. Steve and Bryant rounded out the varsity finishers for the first meet.
It seemed somehow fitting that we should run the varsity, JV and girl races together. We’ve been training as one team and on this opening day we all ran together. Robert and Soe rounded out our JV performance and Sydney was our first female finisher at 20:14. Kathleen and Dulce finished strong to finish our women’s line up for the first meet. John, our freshman, didn’t have enough practices to race today, but that didn’t stop him from coming to the meet and recording the day in photos.
Everyone learned something today. Some said the hills weren’t as bad as they had expected. Others said we needed more hill work. Dobbs Ferry didn’t run their best runners. They may want to reconsider that next time as they won by only three points 26-29. It’s only the first meet and we still have a lot of the season ahead of us. This was our first look at Van Cortlandt. We’ll be back again.
2.5 mile course
place runner time
1 Arnold Lane 15:29
4 Hashem Nasarat 16:03
7 Allen Thomas 18:02
8 Joji Jacob 18:59
9 Russell Tobias 19:01
18 Steve Samuel 19:32
19 Bryant Villa 19:39
22 Sydney Bridges 20:14
24 Robert Muller 20:24
26 Kathleen Gonzales 22:52
27 Dulce Rosas 23:12
28 Soe Latt-Naing 23:21
