The Etrain 11: Wyomissing? More Like Wyo-making

After squeezing through the crowd, I reappeared on the opposite side of the final hill. I was a bit taller than the average spectator in my area so I opted to stand behind and utilize my tippy toes. The AA State Champion was about to be crowned and there was tension in the air. Over the loud speaker, they had just announced the standings at the 2 mile mark. Harbor Creek led the way, but just 4 points back was Dallas. A few of their supporters were waiting nervously not far in front of me. York Suburban, the runners up in 2016 and 2015, were in 4th place but were only 21 points out of the lead with a history of making a strong final surge. Their supporters were behind me as Isaac Davis rolled through the final hill and cruised to an individual state championship. A short while later, I could hear the cheers: “C’mon Bryce!” As I raised myself up to full height again, I saw York Suburban’s #1 runner come into view and take the first spot in team scoring.

No more than 10 seconds later was a Harbor Creek. Another Harbor Creek. Then a York Suburban. Two Dallas. A third Harbor Creek. It was hard to keep it all straight. Especially this far into the race. Every second a person was coming by, sometimes in waves of two to three. As Wyomissing’s first runner put on a sprint to the finish, a pack of four runners were closing in on the finish at the same time. Three of those were other team scorers. In the results, four runners crossed the line at the exact same time of 16:51. But the first of those finishers was Wyomissing’s Joe Cullen.

***

Cullen has been a team leader on Wyomissing long before his senior season. As a sophomore, he anchored his team’s 4x800 with a herculean anchor split. Less than a year later, he was a district champion in cross country and a state medalist. As a result of his leadership, Wyomissing finished 11th in the state in cross country. However, despite an excellent fall, they left 2016 wanting more.

“Last cross country season was a rollercoaster of ups and downs as it unfolded,” said Ben Kuhn, a then freshman on Wyomissing’s 11th place team, “But fluke or by burn-out, members of our team consistently had terrible races at states.”

On the track was where Wyomissing seemed to naturally excel. Cullen in particular shined in 2017. After anchoring his Wyomissing team to second in the state, he ran 4:13 in the 1600. He also added a 1:53 open 800 meter performance to his list of accomplishments. But could that success be duplicated on the trails?

“Knowing that we are perennial contenders in track gave us a lot of confidence that we could step up to be a state-caliber cross country program,” Joe said, “In trying to take our program to the next level, we sought to emulate the consistency with which we’ve achieved our success in the 4x800 and 4x400.”

After leading the team at Paul Short and Districts, Cullen finished the state championship for Wyomissing as their #1 guy for a second straight year and earned another state medal for his quickly expanding collection.

***

After Cullen sprinted past, there was a bit of a pause as we waited for another recognizable jersey in the team title race. Then, at about the 17 minute mark of the race, two more Wyomissing jerseys came streaking into view. Ben Kuhn and Matt Driben were sprinting hard toward the finish. Driben had been in 76th place at the mile, but had moved up some 40 spots since then. Of course, he had overcome much more than that to get to this point.

***

Although Cullen was a leader on the course and in the locker room, but the 2017 Wyomissing squad would not have been as lethal if it wasn’t for the emergence of their 2-3 punch: Ben Kuhn and Matt Driben. From the first invitational at Paul Short, these two had made a name for themselves with times of 16:04 and 16:12 respectively.

“Having my teammates step up was huge,” Cullen said about the rise of his closest teammates. The importance of this was perhaps clearest at the Berks County Championships. It was here that Kuhn and Driben stepped up to the #1 and #2 positions on the team, filling the low stick shoes in a moment of need on a difficult course. The pair doubled down on that success by finishing 3rd and 9th in the District, with Kuhn the top returner for the 2018 edition of the race.

It was unclear in the preseason how good either of these harriers would be. Kuhn was just a sophomore and, although he had shined as a rookie, it’s rare to see a sophomore who contributes as much as he did in his second year in high school. For Driben, a senior, the trepidation did not revolve around youth, but instead, ironically, from experience.

“My sophomore year, I had two high hamstring injuries that damaged my performances during XC postseason,” Driben recalls, “Then, I suffered a knee injury in August going into my junior year that prevented me from running the entire cross country season.”

This would have been crushing to an average running, but not to Driben. He cross trained feverishly, peaking at a 100 minute bike workout. The hours he put in away from the track made him that much stronger when he returned, resulting in some great performances in the spring of 2017. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough came at Paul Short with his 16:12.

“Our first and only invitational of the season, Paul Short, had fantastic conditions and it was awesome to roll on the long, flat straightaways at Lehigh. It’s not often that a high school senior gets a 50-second PR, and I was in disbelief with not only how I had performed, but also that we had our top 6 guys under 17 minutes.”

***

Soon after Kuhn and Driben crossed the finish line, a 3rd runner from Dallas and a 3rd runner from York Suburban came into view. That meant if Wyomising wanted to have any shot at the state title, they would need their 4-5 to come through quickly. Well, Josh Diehl and Thomas Foster did not make their teammates wait long. Diehl closed the gap on York Suburban’s #3 Josh Kerr, placing just one spot behind him in the standings. Then Foster, at 17:19, came across the line 6 seconds later. Foster was one spot ahead of Dallas’ #4 man Josh Wyandt and 3 spots ahead of Harbor Creek’s #4 Nate Dougan. Helping to push Foster and Diehl along was Ryan Vargo, Wyomissing 6th man and another reliable contributor who raced through 2 miles with his teammates and hung on for a top 100 finish, 46 seconds faster than he ran a year earlier.

If Wyomissing was going to sneak in and steal the state title, it would have been thanks to this back part of their varsity line up.

***

Josh Diehl, Thomas Foster and Ryan Vargo were the 4-5-6 guys on Wyomissing’s state qualifying squad in 2016. However, that season, none of these boys cracked 18 minutes on the Hershey course. As a result, Wyomissing was 11th in the team standings. Knowing how critical their improvement would be to the team’s success, this trio used the summer to get out and train hard. However, it would be a while before they got to taste the fruits of their labor.

“We intended to keep a low profile and not go hard until Paul Short and post season,” said Vargo, “My teammates and I were looking to be noticed by the state, but we did not want them to know what we were capable of.”

“Yet.”

At Paul Short, Vargo led the way for the Wyomissing trio and ran 16:55 while Diehl and Foster followed closely behind, also cracking the 17 minute barrier. Wyomissing beat out two-time defending state champs Dallas and got their confidence going.

“With the incredible races that my teammates had, we realized we had a chance to win states, and that meet was one of the most important moments in the season.”

Building from that moment, the Wyomissing pack only became stronger. By the time their county and district meets concluded, the spread for this team had started to shrink significantly. And Wyomissing’s competition around the state was finding out just how much that impacted the results.

“At Paul Short we almost had 2 packs running, one of our top three up front and then a good distance behind them our 4 through 6 guys,” sophomore Thomas Foster explained. “We knew that we would need to close the gap between those two packs to compete at a high level, and the three of us worked hard to close it up. It all came together at states.”

***

“About 15 minutes after I crossed the finish line, I remember laying collapsed on the ground queasily as I watched another team start celebrating,” Joe Cullen remembers, “My teammates and I were hoping for a second place finish at that point; winning seemed out of the question.”

One of the trickiest things about being a fan of Cross Country is the fact that isn’t always obvious when watching a race which team won. It’s not like football or basketball where a scoreboard keeps the standings for you. It’s not until after the race is finished, results are verified and math is calculated that you actually know who came out on top.

So as fans from all sides waited, second guessing their races, trying to remember which jerseys were close by, the tension and excitement grew until finally it burst to the surface.

“The greatest part of this past season will always be winning states,” said Josh Diehl, perhaps the MVP of the season, “I can still remember the bitter taste of disappointment and then the explosion of excitement when we saw the results and realized the Wyo Boys Cross Country team had just taken their first state title ever in the history of the program. All the time and effort our coaches and team had put into finding results of our competitors, comparing time spreads and making sure our bodies had enough time and care to recover had paid off.”

There are no perfect days at the state championship, but Wyomissing’s guys ran hard for one another on state Saturday. When they needed someone to step up and make a play, that’s what they got.

“Although our top 3 were aiming for states medals, we knew our strength was our back end,” says Driben, “We figured if our #4 and #5 were close to our top 3, we would have a decent shot at winning. And they delivered- our #4 and #5 beat all other AA teams’ #4 runners. In fact, the only team in any classification that had a better #5 than Thomas was LaSalle which won in AAA.”

Thomas Foster, that critical number five man, had this to say about the golden moment: “Our team is a very tight knit group, and we spend a lot of the time throughout the year training together, so it seems fitting that any major victory like a state title should be won through the contribution of each member of that group.”

You cansee the full interview with the Wyomissing squad here. This group seems very professional and well-written. They are confident in their abilities, but also respectful of their opponents and incredibly appreciative of their coaching staff’s time and effort to get them to this point. Every one took the time to thank their coaches and praise their competition. Hard to believe there were only 2 seniors in this group! Everyone seemed mature (and fast) beyond their years! Congrats to a deserving group of state champions and good luck going forward!