November 29, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

GFS cross country fifth, Kaulbach a close second at Regionals
by TOM UTESCHER

The GFS cross country team completed a successful season last weekend. The team was the best in its league and was extremely competitive in several regional tournaments. It placed fifth in the Northeast Regionals held on Saturday, Nov. 24.

Facing elite cross country runners hailing from New Jersey to Maine, Germantown Friends School senior Max Kaulbach finished second and the Tigers placed fifth in the team standings at the Nike‚ Northeast Regional Team Championships last Saturday.

At the finish line, Kaulbach was a mere 6/10ths of a second behind individual winner Robert Gibson of Brookline, Mass., whose team, Brookline High School, edged out Danbury Conn., 86-87 for the team title. The GFS senior turned in a time of 16:01.5 on the 3.1 mile (5K) course at Bowdoin Park in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., which is located along the Hudson River about 60 miles north of New York City.

Another Tigers upperclassman, Jake McKenzie, came in 13th in 16:37.2, and his brother Gus, a sophomore, was 27th in 17:03.9. Isaac Ortiz, the third member of the senior trio which helped build the GFS program into a distance running power over the past few years, finished 51st in 17:29.5, and junior Eddie Einbender-Luks took 73rd place in 17:55.0.

Germantown also saw sophomore Tom Waterman come in 90th (18:07.7) and another tenth-grader, Ross Wistar (18:30.4), was 108th out of 146 finishers from 22 different schools.

The top five runners from each school scored in the event, and GFS emerged with 165 points. New Jersey state champ Don Bosco Prep was third with 96 points, and North Penn High School, of Lansdale, was fourth with 105 points.

Team champ Brookline saw its number two man, David Wilson (16:16.0), finish up third overall, almost 15 seconds behind the Tigers’ Kaulbach. Coming in fourth and fifth were Danbury’s Willie Ahearn (16:17.1) and Matt Terry (16:24.5). Robert Molke of Don Bocso was sixth (16:26.5), winning a finishing sprint with North Penn’s Brad Miles (16:26.8). Harriers from New York state actually competed in a separate regional race held at the same site later in the day, but the winning time in that event was a relatively slow 16:22.9.

In terms of the quality of competitors, GFS coach Rob Hewitt said, “The Northeast Regional was as strong as you’re going to find around.”

The Bowdoin Park course, he noted, was “tough, challenging. It rose up for a mile-and-a-half, and then came back down for about another mile-and-a-half.”

During the downhill section, Hewitt said, Brookline’s Gibson opened up a gap on the other top competitors, and Kaulbach was running third.

“From there, it was really Max running him down for the most part. He worked back up, Gibson opened up a gap again, then Max walked him down in the last 20 or 30 meters, but there just wasn’t enough room left in the course.”

The halfway splits showed that Kaulbach was one of the few runners who grew faster as the race went on, and he was the only one to cover the second two-and-a-half kilometers in under eight minutes. The GFS standout had turned down the chance to run in a series of championship races that Foot Locker‚ sponsors for individual runners (rather than teams), where he may well have qualified for a national meet in San Diego next month.

“That’s typical of Max,” Hewitt pointed out. “He’d rather have team success than the individual glory. He made that decision at the start of the season and he never wavered.”

The Tigers had set the ambitious goal of becoming one of just 22 teams from around the nation to reach the Nike‚ Team Nationals, but came up just a bit short.

“Our strength is in our up-front running,” the Tigers’ coach explained. “We got a good day out of Max and out of Jake, and a great day out of Gus. For a kid who fell twice in the mud, he ran fantastic.

“In a lot of our races,” he went on, “our fifth man [the last one to score in a meet] would close the door within about a minute to a 1:15 from Max, but this time we went 1:54 in between, and that left the door open a really long time for other teams.”

The top two squads in the Northeast race, Brookline and Danbury, automatically advanced to compete at the Nike‚ nationals, which will be held this Saturday (12/1) in Portland, Ore. In addition to the first and second-place finishers in the nine regional races, the final national field includes four squads who received at-large invitations, one of which was Northeast number three Don Bosco.

In their remarkable 2007 season, the GFS Tigers repeated as PA Independent School Champion. On their numerous trips out-of-state, they competed against the best of the best, squaring off against both private and public schools, most of them with much larger enrollments than Germantown Friends.

At a prominent early meet in Hartford back in September, Kaulbach lost to Danbury’s Ahearn (one of the touted runners he beat last weekend), but Germantown’s second-place team showing, just one point behind the Connecticut power, established the Tigers’ credentials as a formidable program. At one point during the season, they were ranked first in Pennsylvania, third in the Northeast Region, and tenth in the United States.

GFS traveled north once more in early October, this time to compete in the Manhattan College Invitational at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This mammoth gathering featured seven different varsity races, and GFS won its event by overcoming a highly ranked franchise from Virginia. In the process, Kaulbach turned in the second fastest winning time out of all seven contests.

After wrapping up the Friends School League title and the PA Indy championship, the team returned to Van Cortlandt Park to participate in the New York Road Runners Cross Country Championships on November 11. Once more, Kaulbach took top honors.

The three seniors on the GFS team, Kaulbach, Jake McKenzie, and Otiz, were all four-year varsity athletes, and they formed the backbone of the squad.

“They decided a long time ago that they wanted to be more than an ordinary cross country team.” Hewitt said. “We did some fantastic things this season. We won a second independent school state championship, and we won the Paul Short Invitational [a major September meet at Lehigh University], which we never had won before. We won the race in Manhattan, and a sixth consecutive league championship, which is always important to the school.”

For 2008, the Tigers will return the four underclassmen who raced in the Northeast Regional, along with prospects such as junior Fenn Hoffman, sophomore Sam Butler, and freshman Evan Caldwell, who won the JV race at the PA independent school meet this fall. Hewitt feels that the league and state titles will be within reach for next year’s group.

Will they have a shot at making some noise at the national level?

“I think the pieces are there,” the coach commented. “All we need are enough of those guys to make the commitment and really go after it.”