BHS Girls Cross Country Beats The Snow And All But Two Teams

Both the Berlin cross country teams competed at the Class MM meets held Saturday, Oct. 29th at Wickham Park, just before the snow began. The boys finished 11th and Ggirls finished 3rd.

The boys ran extremely well in their last race of the season.  

"We had 6 of our 7 runners under 20:00 and 2 under 19:00," Berlin coach Steve Soucy said. "James Dwyer was our top finisher in 18:33 good for 55th place overall followed by Matt Kall in 18:39 in 59th place. We then had the pack of three runners to close out our five scorers come in within 12 seconds of each other."

Will Cavedon, Lawrence Betterini and Ryan Kliszewski finished close together in 70, 72 and 75th places.  

"The team had two main goals this season, finish in the top-10 and set a school record at Wickham," Soucy said. "They ran hard and came really close to both.  They missed the school record of 1:34:19 set in 2003 by 11 seconds.

"I was really happy with the performance as a team, especially for our seniors.  Will has been such a good leader for this team over the last few years and Frank Davilla has worked so had to break into our varsity team that it was great for them to finish with a strong team effort."

The girls closed out a terrific season taking third place in Class MM.

The Redcoats were led by Brittany Sullivan 20:55 (17th), Kaylene Sylvain 21:06 (21st), Kristen Madeia 21:10 (22nd), Nicole Grieco 21:22 (25th), Taylor Lupini 21:46 (39th), Alex Carbonell 22:10 (45th) and Nicole Sylvain 22:32 (52nd).

"This was again a true team effort," Soucy said. "We only beat Joel Barlow by two points. Our fifth through seventh runners really made the difference by pushing a few of their runners down lower in the scoring.  Barlow actually beat us on time by two seconds. When we ran 1:52:11 at the CCC South meet, I thought they had run about as good of a race as I was going to see from them all year.  They turned in an amazing 1:46:19 today.  

"The best part about this team has been the depth all season and today was no different. Our two team leaders, Kaylene and Brittany, have been consistently our top 2. But after them, someone new every race has made a huge impact. In the CCC South meet, Nicole Sylvain and Alex Carbonell really stepped up.Today freshman Kristen Madeia lowered her time by 1:54 from the CCC meet and Nicole Grieco, after being ill for the last meet, finished in our fourth position.

"They have been so focused all year, I was really happy for them to finally have success at the state level. Last year they were devastated with our 10th place performance, they really wanted to improve upon that this year. We finished the year winning our first CCC South Championship, having the fastest team time ever by a Berlin XC team and having the best place finish at the state level ever by a Berlin team. This can only help us going forward. On the bus ride home they were already talking about the upcoming track seasons."