Centaurs pg 9 11-7-19
- Details
- Category: Current Issue
Before the CIAC State Open championship even took place Nov. 1 in Manchester, Woodstock Academy girls’ cross-country coach Joe Banas sat down and crunched the numbers for the three Centaur runners who had qualified for the event.
He then projected where each should finish based on the previous week’s performance by everyone at the state championship meets.
He thought both sophomore Linsey Arends on the girls’ side and junior boys’ runner Ethan Aspiras had a chance albeit less than a 50-50 one to finish in the top 25 and qualify for the New England championship race this weekend.
“The numbers going in had (Arends) at 37th or 38th and from that list and she just needed to drop about 15 or 16 seconds,” Banas said.That would have been to reach the top 25. Nov. 1, she finished in 33rd.
After a storm the night before, the course was, at best, mushy. At worst, downright treacherous.
Gusts were occasionally peaking around 40 miles per hour during the race. “It was very tough,” Arends said.
Arends tried to start a little slower so as to conserve energy for the end of the race.
That was also difficult as runners tend to get swept up in the pack.
It hurt Arends a bit when she tried to catch ECC champ and fellow sophomore Jordan Malloy of Bacon Academy.
Arends was, like she had been in the ECC championship meet, within shouting distance of Malloy. She just couldn’t quite catch her.
Malloy also just missed out on qualifying for New England’s with a 30th place finish.
It was Arends’ second State Open opportunity. She finished 61st as a freshman.
She’s hopeful that she will again make the Open in 2020 and, this time, crack the top 25.
Woodstock Academy junior Stella DiPippo was running in her first State Open championship.
She found one of the pitfalls quickly.
“There was a huge crowd around me the whole race. It was not like any other race I had run at Wickham. I got swallowed up in the middle of a big circle. It kind of makes it more fun because you stick with one girl and try to pass another but it is hard with the footing because you have people in front, behind and to the side,” DiPippo said.
With nowhere to go, DiPippo finished in 84th.
“It looked like she was trapped because I saw her on a hill and she couldn’t go left, couldn’t go right and when you can’t get traction or shift to either side, trapped is a good term to use,” Banas said.
Boys
Woodstock Academy junior Ethan Aspiras was the only Centaur boys’ runner to qualify for the State Open and, like both Arends and DiPippo, had outside hopes of making the New England championship by placing in the top 25.
Aspiras was running in his first-ever State Open race. He finished in 46th.
He wasn’t disappointed.
“I was just going for time,” Aspiras said. “I got 17:05 and on a day like (Friday) where there were mud pits and 40 miles per hour wind, it was brutal. But I think I still did well just based on my time.”
Aspiras was locked back in the 80s early in the race but gradually worked his way through the pack.
The Woodstock Academy coaching staff, based on prior times, had predicted Aspiras might break the top 40, coming in around 39th. His actual finish was not all that far off.
He ran the kind of race that we expected him to run. There’s always that tug between running hard from beginning to end and possibly burning out, and holding back a little bit at parts of the race so that you can finish strong. I feel he did a little bit of both (Friday),” said Woodstock Academy boys’ cross-country coach Peter Lusa.
Aspiras, the ECC champ, was the third finisher from the league in the race. E. Lyme sophomore Luke Anthony finished 38th and Griswold freshman Michael Strain was 42nd.
No runner from the ECC qualified for the New England championship.
Lusa said the big challenge for Aspiras may be taking on the one person who can hold him back and that is himself.
Marc Allard
Director of Sports Information
The Woodstock Academy
..