BY MATT STOUT
Maybe on a different track, different day and different foot, Brendan Hyland could have surpassed Manchester Central’s Matt Paulson for the 1,500-meter state title on Saturday, Feb. 3, during the Class L indoor track and field championships at Dartmouth College.
Running on Paulson’s heels the entire race, the Concord senior made his move at the start of the last lap, running shoulder to shoulder with this past fall’s cross country state champion entering the lap’s first straightaway.
But on a 200-meter track, Paulson kept his slim lead through the final turn and out-kicked the top-seeded Hyland for first place with a time of 4-minutes, 5.26 seconds, nearly a second better than Hyland’s mark of 4:06.23.
Already recovered from tendonitis that sidelined him during the cross country season, Hyland’s also had to overcome a sprained ankle and nagging blister on his left foot that at times severely limited his training.
Despite the second-place finish, Hyland’s performance and teammate Kyle Audet’s third-place showing in the same event accounted for the Tide’s 14 points in a 10th-place team finish, 73 points back of champion Merrimack.
“The big highlight of the day was the 1,500,” Concord coach Tim Gunn said. “There were only two races – a race for first and another for second.”
Twenty minutes after his finish, Hyland was still hunched over in a chair next to a trash pail, almost hidden by a set of adjacent bleachers. He was tired, but in good spirits.
Forget 20 minutes. Recovery time, he said, has sometimes stretched into a week this season.
“But I’m happy with it,” Hyland said of his finish. “We both knew it was going to come down to the kick, but I didn’t have good positioning. I was in lane two, he was in lane one, and with a short track, it’s really hard to pass on the corners. I had to work that much harder, and it was that much more of a cushion for him, and I just couldn’t get by him.”
Audet, a senior who entered the race seeded sixth, stayed back as others like Pinkerton Academy’s John Greenlaw tried to make a run for the top spot. The Astros junior couldn’t keep the pace,
though. Audet made his move with 400 meters to go, taking third with a time of 4:12.31.
“I knew those two would run away with it, and I knew I had a good shot at coming in behind them,”
Audet said, before adding about Greenlaw, “I just didn’t want a kid with dreadlocks and shaved legs to beat me.”
Concord results
Trevor Shea ran a personal-best time of 8.61 seconds to finish ninth in the 55-meter hurdles, and Zach Brosseau took 12th in the shot put with a throw of 37-feet, 4 inches.
For the girls, Concord’s Moriah Brown finished fifth in the shot put with a toss of 33-04.25; Faye Harrington placed sixth in the high jump with a leap of 4-10; and the 4 X 800-meter relay team of Elise Luers, Lauren Ryan, Caitlin Hyland and Skye Butman placed sixth with a time of 10:08.74.
Together, these athletes earned the Tide’s four points.
Bow results
The Bow girls 4 X 200-meter relay team of Emily Hannon, Jill Hannon, Julia Waddell and Timiny Mosher earned all of the team’s points in the Class I meet with a third-place time of 1:52.51. Elodie Reed was the top individual finisher at eighth in the 1,500.
On the boys side, Ian Verderame and Jon Dugas placed third and sixth, respectively, in the 55-meter dash with times of 6.79 and 6.84 seconds, earning the squad’s seven points.
For complete results, visit lancertiming.com.