Early Season Recap
Forks XC is back in action with a normal fall season for the first time in two years! After a busy and successful September, both the boys and girls teams have put themselves in great positions entering the heart of the season.
The beginning of the season certainly did not lack quality competition and big time meets. We opened up at Fortin Park which is the home of the 2021 STAC Championship. Pipher Reid recorded a landslide victory of 44 seconds over some of the best quality runners in the area. Quinn Sirgany added a 14th place finish in her cross country debut to help the team finish 4th out of the 30 schools that were there. Audra Ackerson, Aubrey Bough, Kathryn White, Cloe McGuire, Faith Brown, Alaina Gumble, and Gabe Dietzman rounded out a great day for the girls.
Brenden Heaney opened up his senior campaign recording a great time of 19:03 to lead a young talented team to a 12th place finish. Connor Little added a great performance breaking 20 minutes for the first time and was joined by Thomas Kapinus, Sammy Dell, Isaiah Wood, Jake Zadjel and Lucas McPeak rounding out the guys team.
The following weekend the team headed to Chenango Valley State Park, home of the 2021 New York State Championship as well as our annual Sectional Championship course. This meet featured some of the best teams in the state as well as country! The girls finished third in the opening heat of the day which included the 11 time national champion Fayetteville-Manlius team. Pipher Reid finished third with Quinn Sirgany and Audra Ackerson adding top 30 performances! Brendan Heaney added a top 30 performance for the boys team as well! Kathryn White and Faith Brown completed the top 5 for the girls and Alaina Gumble ran a new 5K PR while Gabe Dietzman improved her time from last week by over a minute! Thomas “TK” Kapinus, Tommy Hillis, Lucas McPeak, and Rory Brennan added to a great day for the boys as well!
This past weekend the team traveled to Durgee Junior High School for the 69th Annual Baldwinsville Invitational. This meet is a staple on our schedule and is always a popular event and course. The course was slightly modified this year to become a full 5K. The girls team, who is ranked 8th in the state on milesplit, led off the day in impressive fashion with Pipher Reid getting 2nd to defending Class C State Championship and current number one ranked Class B runner in the state Elizabeth Lucason. Pipher was 14 seconds behind her, a gap that has been decreasing. This course ran roughly 20 seconds faster than Chenango Valley State and about the same as Fortin Park. We have several runners who saw MAJOR drops in their times. Our number 2 and 3 runners for the girls teams, Quinn Sirgany and Kathryn White combined to run 3 minutes faster than the previous week to join Pipher in leading the girls to a 10th place overall finish for the day. This included victories over highly state ranked Waterloo as well as perennial powerhouse Ithaca. Audra Ackerson added another extremely consistent performance. All 3 of her finishes this year have been within 23 seconds of each other. Aubrey Bough rounded out the top 5 and number 6 runner Faith Brown ran her fastest time of the year by a minute and ten seconds! Alaina Gumble added another sub 30 performance as well.
Senior captain Brenden Heaney led the boys team for another great day of top to bottom performances. Connor Little and Thomas Kapinus were the next finishers and contributed to a really nice day for the top three Forks harriers. For the boys, it was runners 4 and 5 who combined for the major time drops. Rookies Tommy Hillis and Rory Brennan combined to drop two minutes and twenty seconds from the week before to help the guys team finish well ahead of pre race expectations. Lucas McPeak and Jake Zajdel added consistent performances as the 6 and 7 runners while Colin Darrow and Jonah Beston got their feet wet completing their first races of the season!
The positive support we have received from everyone has been overwhelming and essential to our early season success! We have raised over 2,000 dollars in our fundraiser and each meet has been full of family and spectators showing their support. We are so grateful to be supported by such a wonderful fanbase and we love seeing everyone out at our meets!
Please feel free to explore our website, especially the roster page where we are in the process of building out profiles for each member on the team. Mr. Brooks runs a Facebook group called “The Long Blue Line” that he updates frequently with pictures and updates from meets.
If you are unfamiliar with our podcast “The CF Exchange Zone” feel free to check it out! We try to give an in depth look at the daily workings of our program. We will be releasing our first episode of the cross country season within the next couple of days and we will try to do at least one episode a week for the rest of the season!
