2005 -- The Four Aces, a Big Heart, and a Race only a Mudder Could Love

So what's a girl to do? You know that your foot could be sending you a final farewell message at any moment, and you can vaguely recall something about a connection between valor and wisdom and that it doesn't involve reckless charges into oblivion. But hey, what would Kerri Strugg say, and what would Paris and Nicky do, and what would Freddy Mercury sing? And besides, you're a senior Cadet captain temporarily-ninja-hellion runner and there can only be one possible answer. Bite down on that foul-tasting lip, fire up the pistons, light out after your teammate, and pull her along with you to the relative safety of the timekeeping head-counters at the finish line.

Hilton's Amanda Griggs charges to finish line at 2005 Nike Team Nationals just ahead of teammate Caroline Schultz. Credit: DyeStat

Later after all your comrades are gathered together and you've hoisted the "headless winged woman" trophy that proclaims you the best in the land for defeating the legendary titan goddesses of the trails, you reflect back on all the improbable things that led to you and the mighty Cadets standing on the podium exulting, "We are the champions." Then you grab the crutches you've been living on for the last eon and cruise off to a night of celebration with your fellow mudder band.

2005 was the year that Amanda Griggs and her teammates Allison Sawyer, Caroline Schultz, Shelby Herman, Ashley Jones, Calleen Childs, Erin Pratt, and Nicole Griffiths put the small central-NY off-Lake Ontario village of Hilton on the map by capturing one of the two team HS sports championships for that year. Hilton's motto of "The little town with a big heart" was played out on a national stage at Portland Meadows in Oregon in the most glamorously mucky conditions a girl could hope for. But though the championship was clinched through an extraordinary exhibition of grit and guts, the path to that performance wound through a thicket of unexpected happenstances, tough decisions, and fortunate rolls of the dice.

A happy group of Cadets flash smiles the night after the 2005 NTN race. Credit: DyeStat

To piece together the story of how a little village of about 6,000 people won a big all-American style championship by beating the long-time superpower Saratoga Springs, you have to first understand that this small town not only has a big heart but also a relatively big school, the 7th largest in NY's Monroe County with about 1400 students. Hilton high school also draws from surrounding towns of Parma, Hamlin, Clarkson, and North Greece, which all help to increase the circulatory rate of that pulmonary system. The area is a farm region but only 15 miles northwest of Rochester, close enough for the expanding ranks of commuters who treasure the apple orchards, grain fields and corn mazes that give an aura of country life.

A fierce inner fire often goes with a big heart, and fires and the fire department were major forces in the history and community affairs of Hilton. A March 1965 blaze was blown into an inferno that consumed much of the downtown and required fire squads from around the county to extinguish. Hilton's old quintessentially small-town American style Main Street -- officially the smallest in the nation at one-block long -- was burnt away forever, and the area's wood frame buildings were replaced by more pedestrian concrete-and-metal structures that were better able to withstand the conflagrations whipped up by Great Lake winds in a flattish region stacked with incendiary farm products like hay bales.

Entrance to Hilton HS Credit: Section 1 - NYS Running

Hilton's townsfolk may have gotten some exercise racing to fight the occasional fire or marching in the local fire department parades, but cross country running was not a sport that the Hilton HS teams excelled at much in the decades before 2000. No Cadet boys or girl team had ever qualified for States, and no runner had ever finished in the top 10 in a race there. The major powers in Hilton's Section 5 area of NY were Fairport, Canandaigua, Penfield, and boys-only McQuaid Academy among the big Class A schools, and Honeoye Falls-Lima was beginning to become the top NY school at the next level down in Class B. The Hilton girls had some respectably productive seasons going toward the tail end of the 1990s, but there were also some famine years when they went winless and any thoughts of capturing a big title were light years away.

Behind every great winning XC program is a coach -- someone likely with a combustible mixture of empathetic toughness, straight-shooting flexibility, experienced inventiveness, but most of all a magical recruiting touch that allows this spellbinder to persuade kids that pounding up slippery mucked-up hills on wet chilly Saturday mornings is their dream way to pass their teenage time. Instead of getting 5-to-10 for lying up the wazoo, they get nice tenured school positions that allow them to spend their Saturdays as motivation providers riding around the state to stand in the freezing rain shouting encouragement to the bamboozled ones who slog up the mucky hills. There are of course some meets run under more pleasant conditions, but in NY that is usually considered a bad thing since only nasty weather can mold the real men and real women of XC. If a girl wants a "nice" running setting, she's gotta move to CA.

In 1998 a young coach and biology teacher named Mike Szczepanik (that's sheh-pan-ik ) took up the Hilton girls' XC position. A graduate of the long-time XC power Fairport and of the State University of New York - Geneseo, Szczepanik had been instilled with a cerebral approach to cross-country training by coach Rick Guido in high school and through readings of XC authorities such as Jack Daniels, coach of SUNY-Cortland. Szczepanik's coaching style not only involved the more standard aspects of listening to the runners and encouraging them to explore the complex nature of their sport and be teachers themselves to younger teammates, but also included a deep interest in new ideas about running and training.  Szczepanik would eventually move toward innovations like more dynamic stretching methods and creating a trail course on the fly at Hilton that would imitate the conditions at the next major meet. He would also include barefooted drills at practice to strengthen the feet at a time that much of America was still running on expensive big-bottomed flotation devices in training. Szczepanik would have good recruiting success over the years, especially once he learned that a promising place to find running talent was on the bench of the soccer team.

Hilton Athletic Director Denny Wilcox at left and a group of Hilton parents enjoyed the Portland NTN experience in 2005. Credit: DyeStat

The first season under the new coach the Hilton girls had some moderate success, but it was not until the last months before Y2K that the XC team began to take the first big steps toward fame and running fortune when freshman runner Shannon Griggs earned a ticket to the States meet in Monroe county and came away with a 16th place medal in the Class A race.

Along with an inspirational coach, winning XC programs often live off one to a dozen local families that are happy to make regular contributions of fast-moving offspring to the teams' pool of running talent and be a big booster of the squads even when their daughters and sons are sidelined with the almost inevitable runner's ailment. For Hilton at the start of Szczepanik's tenure, that family was most prominently the Griggs, whose parental units Cheryl and David were themselves runners and to some extent veterans of school running programs. Nathan, the eldest of the Griggs children and a member of the Class of 2001, got the family off to a running start on the boys side in the late 1990s with a solid showing that would take him to a spot in 1999 in the big NY Federations Championship that followed the States meet, plus a few years on SUNY-Brockport's team. But it was Nathan's sisters Shannon and Amanda, two and five years younger respectively, who would boost the family into national running prominence.

In 2000 with their brother in his senior year, sophomore Shannon and 7th-grade newbie Amanda teamed up for the first time in early September meets, and the two extremely close sisters also stayed together on the XC trails, though Amanda was always careful in the early years to give her elders (3 years for Shannon) due precedence at the finish line in both XC and track. In combo with senior Kim Cipura, the talented but-not-too-deep Cadets powered through to an 18-2 record by using that unbeatable XC strategy of capturing the first three places. At the end of the season, Shannon Griggs again qualified for the States meet from Section 5 along with a strong Penfield team, and this time she moved up three spots to finish with the 13th-place medal.

Shannon and Amanda Griggs at track meet in 2003. Credit: Tully Runners

With both of the Griggs sisters back for the following two years, the opportunity to build behind that strong duo and create a sectional powerhouse seemed to be set. But in XC, trouble is always just one misplaced step away. Early in the 2001 season, Shannon Griggs began suffering leg ailments, and her running year was over. 8th-grader Amanda Griggs tried to fill in for her sister, but the depth wasn't there for the Cadets and they tumbled back, though Amanda earned her first ticket to States and finished a strong 30th. The following 2002 season found the Cadets in better position as now-senior Shannon Griggs recovered enough to run in the second spot behind her sister and help push Hilton to 2nd place in the Section, though still 51 points behind top team Fairport. Freshman Amanda finished 3rd at Sectionals, however, and she also nabbed her first medal at States with a 14th place. Shannon graduated and headed off to collegiate Division-3 running power SUNY-Geneseo but not before completing one last sister act, earning a spot in the NY Indoor Track States 3000m event, a race dominated by Saratoga freshman Nicole Blood, while Amanda ran in the 1500m race.

In 2003 the beginnings of a winning nucleus began to form behind Amanda Griggs at Hilton. 8th grader Ashley Jones joined the Cadets and she established herself strongly in the second spot to help keep the team competitive. Griggs continued to drive herself upward, finishing the year ensconced among the top 30 runners in NY as calculated by the newly acclaimed Tully Runner speed rating index. Though Fairport once again took the sectional title, Griggs won the Monroe County meet and earned her third at-large individual berth at States, where she again took home a medal with the 20th place. The Cadets were on their way to four straight years at the top in Section 5.

Allison Sawyer (second from right) runs to a 21st place at the Federation Meet in 2004. Credit: Tully Runners

Hilton runners celebrate 5th place finish at the Federation Meet in 2004. Credit: Hilton HS XC

While Hilton had been climbing its fitful winding path towards the top, Szczepanik and crew could see firmly roosted at the summit a Saratoga Springs team that during the past two decades had achieved a legendary status under Coaches Art and Linda Kranick. Beginning with a first States title in 1987, the Blue Streaks had rolled to 13 more championships through 2004 while also winning the previous 5 of the large-school class races.

A dominating force at every meet during many seasons with strong and deep lineups that counted state champion winners and hall-of-fame denizens such as Cheri Godard, Jessica Milosch, 4-time state champ Erin Davis, Danielle Coon, and then-current 4-time-winner (a 5th kind of got lost) Nicole Blood, Saratoga's ever-replenishing system was the envy of every school. Ten times in the previous 18 years Saratoga finished the season ranked number 1 in the nation according to the XC poll in Harrier magazine, the authoritative running magazine started by Marc Bloom in 1973. Saratoga even achieved the top national ranking in 1995 when New York's arcane system of qualifying for the state championship meet left the Blue Streaks out in the cold after they were edged by Shenendehowa in the Section 2 state qualifiers.

Saratoga team on podium following NTN win in 2004. Credit: DyeStat

In 2004, the Nike corporation established a national team-championship meet (no at-large individuals then) for 20 selected high school boys and girls squads on both sides, holding it near company headquarters at a highly convertible horse race track called Portland Meadows in Oregon. Working off previously sponsored ventures such as the Battle of the Borders meet between Oregon and Washington schools, the new Nike Team Nationals (NTN, later NXN) was a three-day extravaganza of sports gear promotion, teenage frolicking, and also a bit of semi-natural cross country action using ramps for hills, hay bales for trail obstructions, and an often muddy running surface in a cool wet climate that would be a little discouraging to any teams from places that enjoy warm temperatures and whose gravel and asphalt running courses look like enlarged track stadiums.

In the inaugural meet in 2004, Saratoga had destroyed the national field with a top 5 that included Nicole Blood, Lindsey Ferguson, Hannah Davidson, Caitlin Lane and senior Karyn Delay, all of whom had placed in the top 8 at the New York State Championship and three of whom would ultimately graduate with at least one individual States title in pocket. Blood, Ferguson, Davidson, and Lane all qualified for and ran in the Footlocker National Championship in the drier, hotter conditions of San Diego, a race that featured 40 of the country's top runners including that year's champ, Aislinn Ryan of NY's Warwick Valley. At the end of the season, Saratoga 2004 was acclaimed as the greatest US girls team ever by any XC fan who had not suffered too many high speed collisions with tree branches.

Despite it all, the Hilton girls had a speculative eye on Saratoga as they continued to develop through the 2005 track seasons. For a team that had made one trip to States where they finished 69 points behind, and never had a runner finish in the top-10 there, it might have seemed a little hallucinatory to think they could compete with a team that had won 13 of its 15 trips to States (losing the two by a combined 1 point) and had 44 top-10 individual finishes. Hilton's Section 5 was also not known for having top level big team schools on the girls side, having won only one state championship and that one having come more than 20 years before. But when Szczepanik challenged the team after the 2004 Federation meet with the idea of knocking off Saratoga, he had gotten back a "That would be nice" response. By early 2005, the interest had grown much stronger.