WOODBURY — Relying on your teammates is a needed trust when playing any sport, but when running cross country, trust in your teammates is especially important.
Nonnewaug cross country needed to show trust in every runner on the team because they didn’t have the numbers to be able to fall back on. The Chiefs had a small team with five girls, but those five were enough to place first in the Berkshire League.
“I think that this season was very successful, not only because we won BLs but also because of how we won BLs,” said freshman Scarlett Ivey, who led the team with a third-place finish at the BL championships. “We only had five girls and Arleigh [Duff, the head coach] was not expecting me to show up either because I’m new to the district. He knew there were only four girls going to run, and with only five of us, we all had to make it to the races or else we could not score, and we all had to do good or we would not have won the meet.”
Ivey explained that, as a first-year runner for NHS, she and the team entered the season without many expectations.
“We honestly just wanted to do the best that we could,” said Ivey. “At the start of the season, I was out of shape and had never done cross country, before so the standards were not that high. As the season progressed, we actually started to stand a chance at winning BLs. About halfway through the season, I knew we would win. We had not lost a meet yet and everyone was just getting faster every race, getting better times, and beating whomever they needed to beat so that we could win the meet.”
Even as being a freshman and never running cross country before, she was Nonnewaug’s top girls runner with a finish in 22:03, while Julianna Bellagamba placed sixth with a time of 22:46.
The Nonnewaug boys cross country finished second as a team behind Thomaston, with Jake Cenatiempo being the Chiefs’ top finisher in seventh place with a time of 18:42.
The boys cross country team also wasn’t high with numbers, either, with 13 boys, six of them being on varsity.
“We ended up taking a strong second, and we were second for the league [BLs],” said Deborah Flaherty, the boys cross country coach, “but then I went back and I looked and that was the best that they have done in 11 years. They haven’t been second since 2011.”
After BLs, the Chiefs ran in the CIAC state championship on Oct. 28. Ivey’s 25th-place finish led the girls in 14th place in Class M, and the boys placed 11th in Class S with Cenatiempo finishing 26th.
