Heading into an Oct. 2 invitational cross-country meet at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Jasper Samuelson kept his legs moving and tried not to dwell too much on the challenge ahead — the biggest race he’d be running as a sophomore on the East Hampton High School varsity team.
Samuelson’s time of 17:13 in the 5K Paul Short Invitational race made him not only East Hampton’s top finisher, but also landed him in 19th place over all out of a field of some 350 runners. He left his previous personal 5K best, 18:04, solidly in the dust behind him.
“This was definitely a breakthrough for me,” Samuelson said in an interview over the weekend. “I feel like I leveled up a little bit in the running world.”
The Lehigh race featured a few more rolling hills than East Hampton High School’s own cross-country course, with a “corn maze-like” path around the athletic complex there and “a nice straightaway, probably 200 meters at the finish,” Samuelson said. Down the stretch, “I wasn’t near anybody on my team, but I was passing a few people from other teams. I think I passed seven people in the last 200 meters.”
There were college coaches from all over the country present, scouting for talented recruits — something Samuelson was aware of while running the race. “I was just thinking about trying to go to college for running . . . so that really motivated me.”
When the top 25 finishers accepted their medals, they got to shake hands with an Olympian: John Gregorek, himself an alumnus of a Long Island high school — St. Anthony’s in South Huntington.
“I got to ask him what it was like being that good of a runner,” Samuelson said. “It was pretty cool. He just said it’s a journey and you’ll get there someday if you keep putting in this work and showing these results.”
Finishing just behind Samuelson at Lehigh was another East Hampton sophomore, Watts Comly-Bolick, in 17:44. “You rarely see them apart, in the hallways or around town and on the cross-country course and track,” said East Hampton’s head coach, Kevin Barry. “They’re always together, cheering each other on. They definitely like to push each other, but every once in a while I do try to separate them so they don’t constantly rely on each other.”
They may be friends, but they are two different types of athletes, Barry said. Samuelson is a fast runner, while Comly-Bolick has the endurance aspect down. “Thursday was a big breakthrough for both of those guys,” Barry said. “The kind of times they had on this course, every college coach will know what that means.”
Also at Lehigh, an East Hampton senior, Sean Perez, finished in 17:52, and Max Bellenoue, also a senior, finished in 19:12 despite tweaking a previous knee injury, Barry said. Andrew Perez, a junior, and Liam Knight, a senior, also represented East Hampton. Knight, with an injury, finished in 19:40; Andrew Perez, new to the team this year, finished in 20.48 at his first major invitational.
And for Barry there was a highlight too. He ran into Linh Nguyen, an East Hampton alumnus whom he’d coached back in the mid1990s, and who is now coaching cross-country and track at Emory University in Atlanta. “He was a workhorse,” Barry recalled. “He was a 4:30 miler and would place in the county races.”
Nguyen gave the Bonac boys a bit of a pep talk before the Lehigh race. “He was telling the team how to run the course, a flat course with some challenging moments,” Barry said. “He told them they’d all get a personal best on this course, as opposed to Sunken Meadow,” the difficult site of many Suffolk cross-country invitationals.
East Hampton, undefeated in four league contests so far, had just come off a meet with Amityville, Wyandanch, and Shelter Island two days before the Pennsylvania trip. In both of those matchups, East Hampton swept all five top finishes. “That’s considered a shutout,” Barry said. “We tried to save some legs for Thursday because the invitational is a lot bigger.”
The team raced at home on Tuesday against Sayville — the only other undefeated team in league competition — with Barry expecting it to be a real showdown. “So, we’ve got a tall order,” he said, “but it’s home, so hopefully we’ll do some nice home cooking.”
