Neenah Invite 2023

When the Neenah coaches put together their first invitational back in 2000 I know they had
hopes of building a high quality early season meet involving a lot of the better teams from the
eastern half of our state. They run a really good meet, the awards are great, and the course is fair
and well-marked. Yet somehow, for reasons I can’t explain, the meet has never really been quite
as big and competitive as it probably should be given the large number of Division 1 schools
located within reasonable driving distance of Neenah. The meet has seen its fair share of really
good runners, but I find it surprising that the field included only 11 schools this year. I’m not
sure why some teams have left the meet, but our philosophy has always been to find a meet and
stay in it for the long haul. I like the fact that we have 22 years of data and stories of past teams
that have made this annual trip to Neenah. It’s a good place to start our season and the Friday
before Labor Day seems like the perfect time to schedule a race before families head out for the
holiday weekend. With temperatures in the low 80’s it wasn’t exactly ideal for racing, but there
was a bit of a breeze and a few clouds so it wasn’t too bad for an early season race. Most of our
guys ran well and we won the junior high, JV, and varsity races by pretty wide margins, followed
by some tasty Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Best of all our new guys (we have a lot of them) got to
see how we behave on a “business trip” and they seemed pretty excited about being on a
winning team and becoming part of the SPASH tradition.

The junior high race at Neenah is always a bit of a mystery. We often show up to find a new
course, a new distance, and this year we put an almost entirely new group of runners on the line.
Of the 36 runners on our junior high team only four were with us last year so it was hard to know
what to expect. Of course we knew that my neighbor kid, Mattias Stoffel, could run but after that
we had a bunch of guys who have only been runners for about three weeks. In a typical year
there will be four or five teams in the junior high race, but this year it boiled down to just us and
the two Neenah middle schools. Two tall, mature looking Neenah runners took the early lead and
looked to be in control of the race until Mattias dropped the hammer on them and set things up
for first year runners Strong and Marshall to move into second and third place with really good
efforts in the last half mile. Noah Cornell ran a great race as our fourth runner and Isaac
Engevold was a strong number five runner in his first ever race longer than a mile.

Mattias ran 5:39 pace which is impressive and matches up well with a lot of guys from our
program who turned out to be really good high school runners. Our program has always been
about more than just producing one talented front runner each year though, and young Mattias
already seems to know that as he left the finish chute and headed back up the course to cheer on
his teammates who we hope will one day carry on the SPASH cross country tradition. With 16
runners in the top 23 places the team title was not in question as we won the meet for the 19th
time in the past 21 seasons. Chiapuzio, Newport, Herman, Suehs, Kirkling, Zdroik, and Aiden
Engevold all ran close to 6-minute pace which was really good to see. Herman and Johnson were
a minute and a half faster than they ran last year and Edison was 1:48 faster than last year which
was great. I won’t try to predict the future after just one race, but we have a big group of 7th
graders who show up, work hard at practice, and seem pretty excited about being part of our
group, and that is exactly how every other great SPASH team has started out.

Our JV team captured the team title for the 16th time in the last 21 years with a near perfect score
and one of the best top five averages we’ve ever run. The 17:57 we ran today is second only to
the 17:47 we ran in 2006, and Graham Ballard’s winning time is our second fastest JV time on
this course behind Nate Hatton’s 17:22, also set in 2006. For as flat as the Neenah course is it has
never seems to run particularly fast, but overall I feel like our guys ran pretty well on a bit of a
warm day. Some of the Marquette Michigan and Neenah runners took the early lead but our guys
did a good job of being patient and slowly moving to the front. We had really good efforts from
Ballard, Lang, and Gundo who are working their way back from injuries. Dash had an
outstanding race, Hojnacki ran very well as our 5th man, and Voetberg, Hinchie, and Chiapuzio
showed good improvement. Jazdzewski and Hyman were the top two freshmen in the race and
the 3rd and 4th best freshmen at the meet which was good to see. Lang, Dash, Holden, Veggie,
and Ethan O’Connell all ran about a minute faster than they did last year while Beavers, Bradley,
and Baird ran a minute and a half faster than in 2022. Ollie Hagen ran 2:21 faster than last year
and Tyce Xiong had the best race of the day with an improvement of 3 minutes and 9 seconds
thanks to an awful lot of hard work and dedication on his part. After our rather uninspired effort
a year ago when Neenah beat us by two points it was good to see our guys get our season off to a
better start as we try to build one of the best JV teams we’ve ever had,

Our win in the varsity race marks the 12th time we’ve won this meet in the last 21 years. 20
points is our lowest point total ever at Neenah, and our 16:21 average time (thanks in large part
to our #1 runner) is the fastest we’ve run (our 2008 team averaged 16:30). As nice as those
numbers are, it’s important to note that we did it without Bode Erickson who was making a
college visit to the University of Minnesota, and Graham Ballard who has just recently returned
to running. Wishus had an outstanding effort to take 12 seconds off of the meet record held by
Tanner Wagner set in 2016 on a slightly different course. His 15:03 is a career best ahead of his
time last fall at NXR in Souix Falls, and makes him the second fastest SPASH runner all-time
behind Solinsky. It was definitely a good way to start his season. Dziak ran an outstanding race
with a 23 second PR and a time that was a minute faster than he ran last year on this course.
Frank set a PR and ran 1:07 faster than last year. Hopp PR’d and ran 37 seconds faster than last
year while Rolloff ran a 20 second PR and dropped 3:28 from last year. Manthey’s 17:46 was not
his career best, but it was 50 seconds ahead of where he was last year at this point which was
good to see. It was a fun race to watch and a really good performance for a team with only one
senior, two guys running their first varsity race, and only three who ran on our state title and
national teams last fall.

Anyone in attendance would certainly have notice the level of fitness shown by Wishus, the early
season time he posted, and the outstanding act of sportsmanship shown by Cooper Erickson and
Ethan Olds at the finish line. A runner from Marquette Michigan was on his way to a second
place finish with a time that would have been just slightly over 16 minutes. He’d run an
outstanding race but unfortunately he collapsed 10 yards from the finish line and couldn’t seem
to get to his feet and finish the race. With no thought other that wanting to help another runner,
Coop and Ethan helped him to his feet and guided him across the finish line. The scene was very
much like the famous incident at the 1908 Olympic marathon in London where a delirious
Italian runner named Dorando Pietri was helped across the finish line by well-meaning officials
only to be disqualified because he hadn’t crossed the finish line under his own power. Had I been
at the finish line I would have cautioned our guys not to touch the fallen runner out of concern
for his disqualification. Fortunately, the head timer saw the incident as an act of compassion that
had no bearing on the outcome of the meet, other than the fact that it added a few seconds to the
finish time of the runners involved. I’m sure that everyone who witnessed or heard about this act
of kindness agreed that the official had made the right call by using common sense rather than
the letter of the rule book. In 1908 Dorando Pietri went home with a special silver trophy
commissioned by Queen Alexandra, while our young men went home with some really cool
Neenah Foundry sewer cap medals, the good feeling of having done the right thing, and the
knowledge, as Cooper said, “that I wasn’t the jerk who passed a guy who fell down.” Just
another thing to love about the sport of cross country.