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Cross-Country Win Was a Nail-Biter in a Downpour

Thu, 04/22/2021 - 17:52
Ryleigh O'Donnell, Ava Engstrom, Emma Hren, Dylan Cashin, and Bella Tarbet repeated as the Division IV champions at Sunken Meadow State Park last Thursday. The defending Class B champs are to run in the county meet today.
Jack Graves

East Hampton High's girls cross-country runners ran in a steady downpour at Sunken Meadow State Park last Thursday, and the team emerged, barely, as Division IV's Class B winner.

"Though it took 45 minutes for me to learn that we'd won -- by 1 point," Diane O'Donnell, Bonac's coach, said during a telephone conversation Sunday.

The reason for the long delay in posting the results had much to do with the fact that "all the electronic timing equipment had been removed. . . . Instead of chips, the girls had 3-by-5 cards clipped to their shirts with their names and numbers."

Kevin Barry, the boys team's coach, "told the girls not to forget their numbers. A lot of these cards became mush during the course of the race, and some girls didn't remember their numbers. It didn't happen with us -- only Ryleigh [O'Donnell] lost her card, but she did remember her number."

Rooting on other members of her five-person team, O'Donnell, whose stopwatch was in her pocket, wasn't at the finish line to see Dylan Cashin cross it eight seconds behind the winner, a fellow freshman, Eva Morris of Bayport-Blue Point, whose time was 16 minutes and 1 second. 

No 5Ks have been run at Sunken Meadow this season. Had the 2.5-mile race been a little bit longer, Cashin, an ever-improving competitor who was not exhausted at the end, "would probably have caught her," O'Donnell said, adding that all her girls were strong runners.

A Mount Sinai freshman who had beaten Cashin the last time they'd met "was third, in 16:12. Then came two Miller Place girls, a John Glenn runner, and a Bayport runner. Ryleigh, our second to finish, was eighth, Emma [Hren] was 12th, Ava [Engstrom] was 14th, and Bella [Tarbet] was 15th. When the individual qualifiers were identified, our girls moved up."
Following "45 minutes of anxiety," O'Donnell said, she was told by "our league rep, Fran Sullivan, that we'd won, that we'd beaten Bayport 43-44."

"It was very, very close. Kevin said we'd won by a minute and 45 seconds all told."

It had been the first time the team had run at Sunken Meadow this season, said the coach. "Dylan took the loss in stride. She and Eva traded the lead a number of times during the race. Eva passed Dylan for the last time on the way down Cardiac Hill -- Dylan's still learning how to run the hills -- and held on the rest of the way to the finish line
. . . I was very pleased with the way Dylan and all of them ran."

East Hampton and Bayport-Blue Point would be back at it today, vying along with Sayville at Sunken Meadow for the county Class B championship, said O'Donnell, whose team is the defending champion.

"We'll have to run a little faster," she said. "It will be another on-the-edge-of-your-seat thing -- every point will count."

O'Donnell said she thought Jackie Amato, Westhampton Beach's lone representative, a senior, would be the one to beat today. "The Division III race had faster times because Jackie pulled everybody out. I'm hoping Jackie will help Dylan with her pacing."

The April 13 Division V race was won by Penelope Greene of Pierson High School in Sag Harbor, who runs spring track for East Hampton.

O'Donnell said she and her team had experienced worse weather than last Thursday's steady downpour. "At the state meet 18 months ago it was 18 degrees, and there were ice puddles. . . . I forget where it was. It was somewhere upstate, up there somewhere."

There will be no state meet for the girls this time. Today's race is to start at 3:15.


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