Stissing Mountain High School wins state title in cross-country

PINE PLAINS — On Friday, Nov. 11, the Stissing Mountain High School boys’ varsity cross-country team won the New York State Public High School Athletic Association cross-country championship for schools of comparable size. 

The Pine Plains team placed three runners in the top 20 in a 5-kilometer (3.1 mile) race packed with 115 contestants. 

Winning the state title was “like a weight being lifted off my shoulders,” said senior Jared Heggenstaller. “We had set a goal of winning the states last winter and then… ‘Wait! We really did this!’” 

The championship meet is scored by comparing the performance of each team’s top five runners. The team with the lowest overall total is the winner. For Pine Plains, junior Maxwell Decker placed eighth; sophomore Daniel McPherson, 11th; Jared Heggenstaller, 20th; senior Nicholas McPherson, 25th; and senior Maxwell Heggenstaller, 28th. This resulted in a team score of 38 points. The second-place team, from South Lewis Central School, southwest of Adirondack Park, finished with a 58-point total. 

The boys’ team was not the only Pine Plains entry to do well at the meet, held at the Vernon Verona Sherrill High School in the village of Verona. Sophomore Violet Bliss, competing as an individual runner, placed 11th in a field of 111 runners.

A cross-country race begins with all runners massing at the start line. “The start of a race like this is a stampede as one huge group gets funneled onto the course,” said Heggenstaller.  

The Pine Plains team had run the course the day before, scouting out the terrain and planning a race strategy. “The course was really brutal with hills, twists, branches and some areas of poor footing,” he said. His twin brother, Maxwell, added: “It’s the kind of course where, if you went out too fast, you’d burn out; and there were definitely some runners who did that.” 

Owing to the stampede at the race’s start, the Pine Plains team was unable to stay together as a group. Their plan was to lay back at the beginning of the race. “At the two-minute mark, we were all pretty far back in the pack,” Jared said. By the mid-point of the race, eight minutes in, the Bombers’ top runners — Decker, Daniel McPherson and Jared Heggenstaller — had begun their move to the front and held their relative positions through the end of the race.  

Coach Ryan Carney said, “This is a huge accomplishment for this group and for our school district.” Carney is very proud of his team. As he told the Herald earlier this month: “These kids are incredible. They’re great students, they are so good to each other.”

Team captain and senior Gabriel Hieter, and junior Nicolas Montoya finished further back, but each has contributed to the spirit evident among this team. Hieter said his role “is to let the fast runners run, work to make sure we stick with our training program, and recruit students to join the (cross-country) program.” Two days after the winning race, the squad gathered after school for a 50-minute run to keep their legs loose. 

The victory at Verona as well as Bliss’ strong showing capped a thoroughly satisfying season for the Bombers. In only its second year, the cross-country program, led by Carney, has enjoyed startling success. They will try to extend their good year on Saturday, Nov. 25, when the boys team will compete again against runners from throughout New York in the Nike Cross Regionals Northeast meet at Bowdoin Park in Wappingers Falls.  

The event will feature two separate competitions, one for New York teams and another for teams from New England, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “New York is traditionally a cross-country powerhouse,” said Carney, and thus fields as many teams in regional competitions as the whole  group of other northeastern states. The top two teams from both the New York group and the other states running on Nov. 25 will participate in the Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, Dec. 2.

This article is courtesy of The New Pine Plains Herald.